ObservancesLewis was an Oxford medievalist who became an unlikely broadcaster, wrote seven children's books in seven years, and produced a book about grief so raw he published it under a false name. His thirty-year argument with Tolkien about worldbuilding is…
ObservancesPratchett left school at seventeen, spent seven years as press officer for four nuclear power stations, and wrote forty-one Discworld novels that made him the best-selling author in Britain. He was dismissed as a comic fantasy writer for most of…
ObservancesLondon was an oyster pirate, a seal hunter, a tramp, a jailed vagrant and a Klondike prospector before he was twenty-two, and he turned all of it into fiction that made him the highest-paid writer in America. He also produced…
ObservancesA memory game from 1780 that accidentally became a carol, containing at least two gifts nobody can reliably identify and one internet legend with no evidence behind it. Twelve gifts, twelve cards, one per day.
ObservancesPicard got a holiday from a background prop. Kirk got nothing, so March 22 is the closest anchor available. The reason it is worth marking has little to do with Star Trek: at 90 Shatner became the oldest person to…
ObservancesFirst Contact Day marks the day in 2063 when a drunk who wanted to get rich flew a warp ship built from a nuclear missile, and the Vulcans noticed. The founding moment of the utopia belongs to a man far…
ObservancesCaptain Picard Day exists because a set decorator hung a banner in the background of one scene. No dialogue explains it. Fans picked June 16 and made it real. That is the clearest example I know of a detail becoming…
ObservancesI 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.
ObservancesThere 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.
ObservancesThe 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.
ObservancesFederal 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 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.
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.
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