With our insides immersed in focussed tranquility, we exist in the present, shunning thoughts of returning to work until they are absolutely necessary. The ego dreads; the id celebrates, as instructed. We are four and a half months away from the dramatic conclusion (which so far is nothing more elaborate than a video of us napping for most of January 1), but we steadfastly remain locked onto the moment. Our moment is virus-free. Our moment is geographically contained to our house and peppered with puppy antics. Our moment is also jam-packed with all of this nonsense:
National Creamsicle Day
Back on our first popsicle day I wrote about how 11-year-old Frank Epperson accidentally left some powdered soda with a stir-stick outside on his porch back in 1905, inadvertently inventing the Popsicle. But who invented the Creamsicle?
I have honestly no idea. The depth of research I’m able to comb for this exercise is scant; I’ve got a pile of celebrations to cover and an actual life to live. Every search result I found pointed me to Frank Epperson, or to the history of the Popsicle. Clearly it was put out by the Popsicle company long after Frank had been bought out or sold for parts. It is the logical evolution of the ice-pop, with creamy soft-serve perfection tucked inside.
And there’s really not much more to say than that. There is no better way to celebrate the Creamsicle than to just eat a damn Creamsicle, which we did – that’s a blue raspberry flavoured treat that Liberty is considering stealing from me. Some celebrations are this simple. Others are more like this one:
Color Book Day
For this bizarre celebration we travel way, way back to 1457. You’re probably aware that the first book ever pumped out of the first printing press was the Gutenberg Bible, written by star of stage, screen, and the best of the Police Academy movies, Steve Guttenberg. But what about the second book?
That second book was published on this day (yesterday’s this day) 563 years ago, give or take a little due to calendar restructuring and such. It was called Mainz Psalter, and the reviews call it a real page-turner. A psalter is a collection of psalms, so clearly ‘religious texts’ was the first literary fad. The book is notable for a number of reasons.
First of all, it features a date of publication, which the Gutenberg Bible did not. This is how we know to celebrate this particular achievement on this day. It was the first book to contain a printed colophon, which is a quick description of the book itself and the publication details. In that sense, it was the first printed book to get meta, and to draw attention to the act of printing. It featured two sizes of type, whereas the Bible only had the one. And perhaps most importantly, it was the first book printed in colour.
We went through decades of photography and filmmaking before anyone figured out how to reliably create those artforms in colour. But Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, two apprentices who split from Gutenberg in order to create this piece of history, made use of black, blue and red inks. It was a time-consuming process, and one that no one was eager to reproduce, which is why you won’t find a lot of colourful books from that era apart from this one. There are only ten copies of Mainz Psalter in existence today, making it even more rare and precious than a Gutenberg Bible.
To celebrate this one we simply learned about something we’d never considered. The first of anything is immortalized forever, but the second can occasionally be even more impressive.
National Kool-Aid Day
Kool-Aid was a Nebraska creation, specifically one procured by Edwin Perkins. Edwin’s dad ran a general store in Hastings, Nebraska, which paved the way for Edwin’s profession: manufacturing stuff people would want to use around the house, then selling that stuff door-to-door. The year was 1920, and this was a legitimate way for someone to make an entrepreneurial buck.
One of his most popular creations was called Fruit-Smack, which sounds like a particularly child-friendly brand of heroin, but was actually a liquid concentrate. In 1927 Edwin figured out how to make the same drink in powder form, which he sold as Kool-Ade in grocery stores, tucking the powder into a small envelope and promising that 10 cents worth would produce 10 glasses of drink. This was the secret. Edwin’s product was in huge demand, and he went from a door-to-door salesman to the head of a successful drink company based out of Chicago.
Edwin became wealthy from his powdered creation, especially when he sold it to General Foods in 1953. You can also become wealthy from Kool-Aid if you’re so inclined, by becoming a collector of vintage products. If you’ve got a packet of Yabba-Dabba-Doo-Berry sitting around, it could net you $225. Got any Pink Swimmingo in the cupboard? You can get $400 for a case of it. Hang on to that stuff and make a mint in 20 years if you’re feeling bold.
Not us. We just drank some of the stuff. It was tasty. Not the tastiest thing we’d drink all day, but for that you’ll have to keep on reading.
National Prosecco Day
If you’re a fan of bubbly wine (and how could you not be? Just look at Liberty, trying yet again to steal the spotlight), you can set aside the expensive champagne and drop-kick that knock-off champ-ale you bought at the dollar store. Prosecco is Italian in origin, made from prosecco grapes, and it is every bit as tasty. To my wife’s palette, it’s even better.
The history of prosecco goes all the way back to Roman author and philosopher Pliny The Elder. Pliny apparently used to rave about the Pucinian, a tremendous wine. The same vino was also touted by Livia, Emperor Augustus’ wife, for its medicinal properties. In the early 1500s a local Trieste wine was created with the marketing gimmick that it was a genuine recreation of the Pucinian. They called it Ribolla. Thing is, there were other wines by that name in nearby regions, so instead it was referred to as ‘catellum nobile vinum Pucinum’ after the castle where this mythical wine had been produced.
That castle happened to be adjacent to the town of Prosecco. Over the ensuing centuries I’m sure that particular wine changed tremendously, but for the sake of inflating our sense of historical gravitas I’m going to pretend that the $20 bottle we downed last night was in fact an exact replica of Pliny’s beloved Pucinian. I know it wasn’t, but we can pretend, can’t we?
And yes, we finished off the bottle. Prosecco is easy on the tongue, so much so that even Jodie indulged a little, and she tends to skip over the alcohol-related celebrations. This one was a treat, and our final alcohol celebration until… cool. Sunday. I can handle that wait.
National Financial Awareness Day
According to the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, 57% of American adults give themselves top marks on how much they know about personal finance. I would most certainly fall into the 43%. I’m not quite at the level of believing lottery tickets are the easy road to financial freedom, but I also have a terrible time when it comes to saving money, keeping to a budget, or investing. If Jodie could counter all of this with a buck-savvy mind we’d be in great shape. Unfortunately she’s all that, plus an impulsive online shopper. If we could afford an accountant, he or she would tell us we’re screwed.
Fortunately, financial habits are not, to my knowledge, hereditary. When our son found his industry sidelined indefinitely by the virus (he is not in an essential vocation, like professional hockey), he decided to train himself to be a day-trader. This is in stark contrast to my approach when I learned I’d be working from home, which was to train myself to be a day-sweat-pantser. I hope his journey is as successful as mine has been.
I also do not possess the financial acuity of my father, whose stack of credit cards upon his death was simply astounding. He would pay one off with another, ride the six months of no interest for the new card, then repeat with another one. I’m not quite that bad. So here’s hoping our daughter learns more from her brother than from us.
We checked our bank balance yesterday and found the news wasn’t as horrible as on some days, though it was worse than others. Our key retirement planning has been our government pensions at this point, which may be ill-advised given that the current inhabitants of said government want to place our pensions into some shaky investments. So maybe the lotto is our ticket out. Either that or one of our kids had better get rich.
Navajo Code Talkers Day
Back in 1982, President Reagan declared this day to honour the 400+ Navajo folks whose code skills helped the US to pull off a victory in WWII. In 2014 Arizona made this an annual affair, and the governor has been commemorating it ever since. Yesterday we took a stab at it.
Why were Navajos enlisted for this? At the time of Pearl Harbor’s bombing, the Navajo language was still an unwritten language. The grammar is tremendously complex, and the language bears no resemblance to any other, even to that of American Indian nations who lived nearby. At the outbreak of the war, it was believed that fewer than thirty people of non-Navajo descent could make any sense of the language. You pretty much had to be raised in the thick of it to make sense of it.
Early in 1942, engineer Phillip Johnston (who came up with the idea to enlist the Navajo in this task) demonstrated under simulated combat conditions that his Navajo volunteers could transmit a three-line English message in 20 seconds. This would have taken thirty minutes by coding machine at the time, and it was virtually unbreakable. The Battle of Iwo Jima would have turned out very differently were it not for the six Navajo Code Talkers who worked around the clock, translating and sending more than 800 messages.
There are only four of those original code talkers left alive today, and the Navajo code remains the only spoken military code to have never been broken by the bad guys. For putting in service above and beyond what anyone could have anticipated, these folks deserve to be memorialized annually.
Saturdays are always a bit more packed than other days. Alas, we find ourselves staring down the barrel of all this:
- World Honeybee Day. We’ve done a couple of bee-related days already; not sure how to celebrate another.
- National Leathercraft Day. We had planned to take a leathercrafting course, but that was before the world melted into a puddle.
- National Relaxation Day. This one I can promise we will celebrate.
- National Lemon Meringue Pie Day. Another celebration we can tackle in doughnut form. Which is good – we don’t need an entire pie.
- Chant At The Moon Day. If our neighbours didn’t think we were nuts for sneaking zucchini onto their porches, they’ll think we’re nuts now.
- Break The Monotony Day. What is monotony? I don’t think I even remember.
- I Love Cowboys & Cowgirls Day. Do I? Well, considering I’m just a few hours into playing Red Dead Redemption 2, I think I know how this celebration will go down.
- National Best Friends Day. I am 100% positive we already celebrated this.
- National Failures Day. Well that’s fun.
- National Check The Chip Day. A day for reminding us to get our animals chipped, though I suppose we could take this title a number of ways.
- Chauvin Day. A day to honour the guy they named chauvinism after. That should be a riot.
celebrate366.com 