Senior Citizens Day: Nobody Thinks Their Life Is Interesting
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.
Holidays and Observances
Every day on the calendar is there because somebody decided it should be. These are the stories of who decided, what they were arguing about, and what a writer can take from it.
Why Write About Holidays?
A holiday is a decision that stuck. Somebody chose a date, argued for a name, and won. Groundhog Day was a farming custom until a movie overwrote a century of it in two hours. Armistice Day became Veterans Day and lost the specific thing it was built to hold. Talk Like a Pirate Day started as a joke between two friends on a racquetball court and now runs on six continents.
Each entry here does the same three things. It tells you where the day came from and who fought over it. It names the parts most people get wrong, including the ones I got wrong myself until the research corrected me. Then it pulls out the craft lesson underneath, because the way a holiday gets named, defended, or quietly forgotten is the same problem a writer faces on every page.
Some of these are national. Some are invented days nobody made official. A few are personal, like the August afternoon in 2006 I spent photographing a crowd dressed entirely in black on a bright theme park street. Browse by month or read straight through. The calendar is more argumentative than it looks.
Your Story Has a Date on It Too
A holiday survives because somebody wrote down what it meant while the people who knew were still around to ask. The same is true of a life and a career. Richard Lowe has authored 113+ books and ghostwritten 54+ more, most of them built from interviews with people who thought their story was ordinary. If yours has a date on it, start with a conversation.