While everyone is looking forward to Christmas break, if all holidays were celebrated similarly, we’d receive many gifts every day and we’d never go back to school. The months have been dedicated to a myriad of causes as well. November, for example, is National Novel Writing Month, National Peanut Butter Lovers Month, Aviation History Month, and more besides. It has everything from a day literally dedicated to absurdity to World Peace Day, on the 20 and the 17 respectively.

Some of these strange holidays are somewhat more well known, such as Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19, but even this is not common knowledge. It’s doubtful any of these obscure holidays will ever be celebrated or even known widely, but once a year, a holiday that only requires a different accent or a little silliness could be a nice change to the weeks of anticipation and preparation which sometimes go into more conventional holidays.

Though these holidays may seem strange and obscure, even widely celebrated holidays, such as Christmas, tend to run a little on the strange side. Christmas is an amalgamation of a winter solstice celebration, the birth of Christ, and decades of fighting over kitchen sets, the latest Tickle Me Elmo, or eighty inch flat screen TVs. It’s nearly impossible to find connections between Santa Claus and Jesus, and yet the holiday celebrates both figures. The collection of years of traditions from a variety of cultures has created a holiday stranger than the many very few people have heard of.