28 March is National Alien Abduction Day. There is no founding body, no act of anything, and no clear origin story. It exists because somebody said it did and enough other people repeated it.
That describes an enormous number of the days on the modern calendar. There are thousands of them now, most invented in the last twenty years, many by companies with something to sell and some by one person with a website.
I find this interesting as a phenomenon, and not because I have any view on abductions. What interests me is that inventing a holiday is one of the few forms of culture-making still available to an individual, and most people who try it fail completely.
Weird Days From Around the World
Before the argument, a short tour, because the range is wider than most people realize.
Spain has La Tomatina, an organized tomato fight in Buñol that draws tens of thousands and produces a town centre ankle-deep in pulp. It began in the 1940s, reportedly from a scuffle, and is now regulated with rules about crushing the tomatoes first.
Japan has a number of festivals built around a single specific action, including Nakizumo, in which wrestlers hold babies and the one who cries first wins. The belief attached is that crying brings health.
Thailand’s Monkey Buffet Festival in Lopburi sets out an enormous spread of fruit for the local macaque population, who behave exactly as you would expect.
South Korea marks Pepero Day on 11 November, a day for exchanging thin stick-shaped biscuits, chosen because the date looks like four sticks. It began as a commercial idea and became widespread.
And Finland has a national sleepyhead day in July, where the last person in the household to wake is subjected to water in one form or another.
What strikes me about that list is how many of them involve doing something physical and slightly ridiculous with other people. Very few successful odd holidays are contemplative.
Why Most Invented Days Die
The failure pattern is consistent and it is worth knowing if you ever want to start anything.
A day that asks for awareness dies. Awareness is a state and states cannot be performed, so there is nothing to do and nothing to photograph and nothing to invite a friend to.
A day that requires preparation dies. If participating means buying, booking or organizing in advance, almost everybody will notice on the morning and conclude they have missed it.
A day where you can be visibly bad at it dies, unless being bad is the point. This is why the successful ones are either trivially easy or so absurd that competence is not a category.
Alien Abduction Day survives in a modest way because it is a joke with an obvious action attached. You post something. The barrier is nothing and the participation is the whole observance.
The Thing Underneath All of It
Strip away the specific customs and the same impulse is visible in every case, including the serious holidays.
People want a reason to do something together on a named day. That is nearly the whole mechanism. The stated subject is often close to arbitrary, and the tomato fight is not about tomatoes any more than the biscuit day is about biscuits.
Which is why declaring a day about a worthy cause so rarely works. The worthiness is not the missing ingredient. The missing ingredient is a thing to do at a time with people.
I have watched organizations spend real money launching an awareness day and get nothing, while a joke with no budget spreads across a continent. The difference is never the importance of the subject.
What This Has to Do With Writing
Directly, and it is the same principle I keep running into.
Readers do not adopt ideas because the ideas are correct. They adopt them when they are given something to do with them. A book full of sound arguments and no actions gets praised and shelved. A book with one usable procedure gets recommended to a friend.
When I work on a nonfiction manuscript, the question I keep asking is what the reader is supposed to do on Tuesday. If there is no answer, the chapter is decorative, however true it is.
The invented holidays that survive have solved that problem accidentally. They tell you exactly what to do and the doing takes ten seconds.
How do you spend Alien Abduction Day?
Lightly, which is the correct way to spend it.
If you write fiction, it is a reasonable prompt. The abduction narrative is one of the most consistent modern folk stories, with a stable structure that recurs across decades and countries, and structures that stable are usually telling you something about the people and not the phenomenon.
And if you have ever thought about starting a tradition of your own, in a family or a company or a group of friends, the rules above are the ones that matter. Give people a thing to do, make it cost nothing, and make it impossible to do badly.
A joke between two people becomes something a continent observes. It has happened before and it will happen again, probably to something equally silly.