Senior Citizens Day: Nobody Thinks Their Life Is Interesting
August 31, 2026
I have interviewed a great many people past retirement for books. Almost all of them apologized for not being interesting enough. They were wrong every single time.
Category: Observances
National observances, seasonal celebrations, and cultural moments seen through a writer’s eyes, from Veterans Day to Mother’s Day, each connected to storytelling and the preservation of memory.
ObservancesAlien Abduction Day: Why Invented Holidays Live or Die
August 31, 2026
There is no founding body and no origin story, which describes most of the modern calendar. The interesting question is why a handful survive and the rest evaporate.
ObservancesGroundhog Day: When a Story Overwrote a Tradition
August 31, 2026
The forecast is worthless and the tradition is a century old. Then a film came out and the phrase stopped meaning the custom entirely, which almost never happens.
ObservancesPresidents Day: The Name Nobody Made Official
August 31, 2026
Federal law still calls the third Monday of February Washington's Birthday. The popular name spread anyway, and turned a day about a person into a day about an office.
ObservancesWashington’s Birthday: The Man Who Gave It Back Twice
August 31, 2026
Washington was not the cleverest man in any room he entered. What he had was rarer: he could be trusted with power, and twice he handed it back when nobody could have made him.
ObservancesLincoln’s Birthday: The Hardest Job Anybody Has Held
August 31, 2026
Lincoln had about a year of formal schooling and taught himself everything else. Then he was handed a fracturing country, and he held it together without helping himself to the power the emergency offered.
ObservancesTalk Like a Pirate Day: Why the Joke Survived
August 31, 2026
A private joke between two friends in 1995 became an international observance in 2002. I drove to a pirate faire for it once, in the worst costume present.
ObservancesBats Day: The Afternoon a Crowded Street Parted
August 31, 2026
Bats Day has brought the goth community to Anaheim since 1999. I went in 2006, dressed after a fashion, and watched Main Street part for a friend who had decided completely what she was doing.
ObservancesArmistice Day: What a Renaming Costs
August 31, 2026
For thirty-six years the United States called 11 November Armistice Day. Then it became Veterans Day, and a specific moment gave way to a general one.
ObservancesVE Day: The War That Was Still Running
August 31, 2026
Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945 and Europe filled the streets. The war had four months left to run, and my grandfather was still a prisoner for every day of it.
ObservancesVJ Day: The Record That Only Exists Because Somebody Wrote It Down
August 31, 2026
The surrender took about twenty minutes aboard the USS Missouri. My grandfather had been a prisoner for three years and four months, and the record of it survives only because he sat down afterward and rebuilt it from memory.
ObservancesRedneck Christmas: What Fans Call the Daytona 500
August 31, 2026
The Daytona 500 has an official name, a sanctioning body and a trophy. It also has names nobody printed on anything, and those are the ones worth listening to.