Planet Money - The holiday industrial complex (Classic)

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

Where do holidays like National Potato Chip Day and Argyle Day come from? We trace the roots of one made-up holiday until we find out who is running the global holiday machine. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. Hello, this is Erika Barris. We're in the thick of the holiday season, so we wanted to revisit one of our favorite Planet Money episodes. It's about manufactured holidays and the industry that surrounds them. This episode originally aired in 2017. We hope you enjoy it and have a happy new year. Newsroom, this is Ed. Hey, Ed, it's Kenny Malone from NPR. How's it going, man? Good, Kenny.

How are you? This guy is Ed Chapuis. He's the news director at Fox 40, a television station in Sacramento. But on this particular day, Ed was so much more than that. Ed was the key to unlocking a mystery I had been desperately trying to solve. Let's start with the facts here. On June 18th, 2015, you guys ran a segment. Do you remember this segment at all? I do not, but I clicked the link, I followed it, and I watched it. She's going to be telling us about some great eats. About another big stinking deal, guys.

So it was a wonderful, lively segment with our morning anchor, Mae Fazai, and a young lady from Rayleigh's supermarket. Joining us this morning, Patty Mastrocco with Rayleigh's Something Extra. And in front of Mae and Patty is a table just covered in tarts and cakes and cheeses and wine. Yeah, so as a matter of fact, the notes describe it as decadent food. Do you know what today is, June 18th? It's National Splurge Day. Need I say more? Uh, yeah, so much more.

National Splurge Day? This drives me insane because it feels like we are suddenly swimming in bizarro holidays. Tomorrow is National Puppy Day. It's National Pancake Day. Potato Chip Day. Ice Cream Day.

Watermelon Day. It just seems like someone is inventing holidays to try and sell us a bunch of stuff. And I wanted to get to the bottom of this. So I came up with a plan. I figured if I could unspool the events that landed one of these questionable holidays on television, if I could follow it back to its origins, then just maybe I could understand what was powering this holiday machine. And this is why I wound up on the phone with Ed Chapuis trying to figure out how National Splurge Day somehow wound up on Fox 40 in Sacramento. And it's funny, I was able to sort of follow and

backtrack from our calendar how we found it. Oh, really? Yep. I have done your sleuthing for you. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. And joining me on this quest is Noel King. Today, we take a journey to the center of the holiday industrial complex. It's a trip that takes us from TV news to the halls of Congress to a storage locker in Chicago. It's a story of power, PR, and one woman actually trying to make the world a better place.

All right, we are chasing National Splurge Day. And I will say it was not hard to find coverage of this holiday. Today happens to be known as National Splurge Day, a day when you're supposed to treat yourself to something. Yeah, I love this one. It's a New York station that did a what would you splurge on segment. Buffalo wings. You can have anything in the world. Supermodels jet around the world. You want buffalo wings. I do want Buffalo Wings. But it was shockingly hard to get someone to talk to me about how National Splurge Day ended up on their TV station. The Buffalo Wings channel, they flat out declined to comment.

A guy at another station, he told me, no one is going to talk to you on the record about this. This is like real evasion. I felt like I was kicking stuff up. You must be onto something. But then I finally found someone who would talk, our guy, Ed Chapuis, Fox 40, Sacramento. I have to tell you, I've never heard of National Splurge Day, so it doesn't surprise me that we did something about it. Ed has a five and a half hour morning show to fill, and he has no shame about National Splurge Day ending up on his air, but he too was curious how it got there. And so he pulls up a log that has every segment his station has ever run, and he flips back to 2015, and there it is.

Okay, I'm going to click on this. National Splurge Day, exclamation point. So there's a record of who pitched it, and it says, what does it say there? So this is emailed by a PR person. And it says, what does it say there? So this is emailed by a PR person. Saturday, June 18th is National Splurge Day. What you're probably asking, what the heck is National Splurge Day? That is literally what I'm asking, yes.

Yeah. So it has the contact person, and her name is Kat Modrew. Okay. That means if you're wanting to backtrack. Yeah, yeah. And it has her cell phone number in there. Oh, fantastic. Hello? Hey, fantastic. Hello? Hey, is this Kat?

It is. Kat Madru is the first lead in our investigation. She's the PR person for Rayleigh's, which is a grocery store chain in California and Nevada. Kat told me, yeah, I pitched National Splurge Day to Fox 40. It was a way to get the grocery store on TV. But she can't remember exactly where she got it from. She told me that she just Googles food holidays, and there are a crazy amount of them. Do you keep a running list of these holidays? I do. I have a folder on my computer with the

different holidays. And do you have it in front of you? Maybe. Could you open it and read me some? Let's see. She's got National Garlic Month, National Meatball Day, even National Raisin Day. I will tell you right now that that is later on this month. And I have a taker and I haven't gotten around to exactly what we're going to be talking about. Wait, wait, wait. So you already pitched National Raisin Day to a media outlet and they said yes without knowing what you would do about it? Yes. And I imagine we can maybe do some trail mix. We could do some baking. We could throw it in salads, put it in.

Okay, so National Raisin Day is not the holiday we're after. But it ended up being a very helpful lead. Because, because, after I hung up with Kat. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. We started poking around, and National Raisin Day is over 100 years old. Yeah, we found an article from 1910 complaining about how it was shameless promotion by raisin growers in the Fresno Chamber of Commerce.

And this is the way some strange days are born. It's exactly what you would think. Money, plus corporate interests, plus maybe a good PR person. And sometimes, even the government is involved. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In fact, the United States Congress used to be a holiday factory. I rise today to talk about National Golf Day. You'll hear these called commemorative periods.

We're still going to call them holidays. At one point, Congress got a little out of hand with the passing of made-up holidays. The peak came in 1985 and 86. This is during the 99th Congress. During that time, one in every three laws was a commemorative day or week or month. That is to say, Congress passed 664 laws during that session. 227 of those were things like National Air Traffic Control Day, National Bowling Week, and National Birds of Prey Month. Legislators were spending so much time announcing crazy holidays that finally, in 95, the House of Representatives said, enough.

And they passed a rule forbidding the introduction of this stuff. We looked, and during the congressional holiday mania, there was no national splurge day passed. But we also learned that after the holiday crackdown, people still wanted a way to get their made-up special days legitimized. And they found one. Drizzly. It's Chicago. It's cold. I was here to visit Holly McGuire. If there were a VIP club for holidays, Holly is the bouncer. Holly, great to meet you.

Nice to meet you. Holly is the editor-in-chief of something called Chase's Calendar of Events. We walk into her office, and she shows me the 2017 edition of the book. It's very heavy. I haven't weighed it. It's 752 pages. 752 pages of all kinds of holidays. Everything from Easter Sunday to Talk Like a Pirate Day. Do you guys call yourself the official keeper of holidays and

special days? Oh, we're a little shy about actually doing that. Is that because we're in the Midwest now? That could be. That could be. But you are, right? Yes, we try to be. Chase's is like the Oxford English Dictionary of holidays. Yeah, but Chase's didn't really mean to become that. This book started in 1957. Back then, it was a pamphlet to help keep track of holidays that change around from year to year. But eventually, chases started allowing submissions for special days, as they call them. And then when Congress issued its holiday crackdown, the world seemed to turn to chases. Right. And people started submitting to us to kind of fill that void. And this is where the search for National Explorers Day gets interesting.

Because it was in chases, but it isn't anymore. What? Uh-huh. About a decade ago, the inventor apparently called chases or emailed or something and asked to have it pulled out. Holly doesn't know all of the details, but she says she can still help us. So she scoots over to her laptop. She pulls up this, like, list. Which is huge.

It's basically every special day that's been in Chase's since 1995. Thousands and thousands of entries. And next to each one is the person who submitted it. And I've organized it alphabetically, and I'm in the nationals. She's reading down the list. There's National S'mores Day. National Soul Food Month. National Soy Foods Month. And then there it is. National Splurge Day. Do you want to just read the text that's accompanying this? Today is the day to go out and do something extraordinarily indulgent. Motto, have fun.

And do, and okay, and so there is a name attached with the creation of this, this particular day. Yeah. Adrian Sue Coopersmith. Adrian Sue Coopersmith. National Splurge Day was not invented by a chamber of commerce. It was not passed during the congressional holiday boom. It was invented and then rescinded by a woman named Adrienne Sue Cooper Smith. And we had some questions for her. Coming up, the last stop on our journey. We meet the maker of National Splurge Day, and it is not what we expected. Our National Splurge Day quest has taken us from a TV station in Sacramento to lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to the holiday gatekeeper in Chicago, and now...

Chicago again. Total coincidence. But, yep, it's where we're headed. All right, I'm like a mile away. I'm excited. I'm nervous. I'm on my way to meet this woman. It's kind of an old downtown. Adrienne Sue Coopersmith lives in an apartment building in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. And when I get there, she's already outside waiting for me and very concerned about my lack of rain apparel. Do you need plastic? No, no, I'm okay.

Adrienne's in her 60s. She has long brown hair that she wears in braids. She's very proudly a Leo. She used to be a secretary and did some freelance public relations work. Do you want me to take my shoes off? Oh, no. So we settle in, we eat some cheesecake,

and she tells me the real story behind National Splurge Day is this. It was the 1990s, it was tax season, and she was bummed. And she thought, what is the silver lining here? So you figure you're going to have your tax return back within two months and three days. OK, you're going to have time to think about the fact that you want to splurge on something. OK, God bless you. That's my cat. My cat just sneezed. I always say God bless her because she's a little she's a a darling. Adrienne decided that two months and three days after tax day, that needs to be National Splurge

Day. So she wrote it up, submitted it to Chase's calendar of events, and it was a hit. The thing is, National Splurge Day, that is just the beginning of it. Adrienne, how many holidays have you created? 1900 that are legally written down, but there's more. Come on, follow me. Yeah, okay. Adrian took me a few blocks away to a place called Uncle Bob's Storage. All right.

She walks up to this 10-foot by 20-foot storage locker. So this is the empire. In this warehouse is Adrian's life work. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of holidays, or as she calls them, holidates. She's been making these things since the 1990s. All right, let's go in. We shimmy into a storage locker.

We'll see what this is. She grabs a box, opens it up. Let's see what we have. This is a whole list of holidays right here. I don't have my glasses on, so I can't see. Oh, do you want me to read? Yeah. This is your interview, dear.

Okay. Let me read them to you. Okay. January 2nd, the Great Escape Day. Yeah, okay. January 16th, Dealing with the Dentist Day. February 6th, PAC, Pay a Compliment Day. Oh, yeah, that one was picked up by Chase's calendar of events.

Really? Pay a compliment day. Oh, yeah, that's big, baby. That's big time. Adrienne doesn't remember all of these because she only submits the best of her ideas to Chase's, and she's had around 20 of these picked up, including National Hug a GI Day, International Skeptics Day, and Second Honeymoon Weekend. There are a handful of people like Adrienne who are prolific holiday contributors to Chase's.

There's a guy who does pun holidays. There's a couple in Pennsylvania who are known for irreverent holidays. But Adrienne has her own style. Her holidays fall somewhere between quirky and profound. In fact, when I was visiting the Chase's calendar editor, Holly. Oh, Lost Penny Day. found. In fact, when I was visiting the Chase's calendar editor, Holly, she read to me one of her favorite Adrian holidays, Lost Penny Day. To put aside all those pennies stashed in candy dishes, coffee cans, bowls, and jars back into circulation, celebrated Abraham Lincoln's birthday. I just

think that's really charming. It's a poetic little holiday. Yeah, and very easy for anybody to celebrate. You were sort of clutching your chest as you read that. I don't always do that. She sounds sad because Adrienne's holidays aren't in chases anymore. About 10 years ago, she asked Holly to pull them out, which is weird. But Adrienne had seen some of her holidays show up in commercials to sell things, and she felt like she was losing control a is weird. But Adrienne had seen some of her holidays show up in commercials to sell things, and she felt like she was losing control a little bit. But I talked to Adrienne for hours, and I actually think that there's a story that helps explain why these holidays mean so much to her. It starts in the 70s, and she was dating this guy. He was a gorgeous British guy. He was

about five years older than I was. I mean, he was really, really, the accent, the coolness, the appeal, that kind of a thing, you know. Adrienne adored this guy, but it was a bad relationship. He drank and she wanted him to go into Alcoholics Anonymous. He kind of did, but not really. So they eventually broke up and she found out later that he had died young. Adrienne says it was because of him and this period of her life that she started to think about events in a completely different way. AA is very similar to an event.

If you can make it through one day and your event is not doing drugs or not drinking. Then yeah, sure, that is an event. But that's an event about absence, about not doing something. And there's all this pressure attached to it. Will you fail? Will you succeed? So Adrienne thought maybe it would be easier or at least make people happier if there was always another event to celebrate. So I started thinking, what can you do in lieu of doing something bad, do something that's an event, even if it's for a minute a day to get you through that day that pulls you away from what you're addicted by? That's kind of beautiful, right?

Yeah, it is. But there is a very real business machine fueled by these made up holidays. PR people use them to get companies television time. There's a book made up of these. It sells for 75 bucks. It's all time. There's a book made up of these. It sells for 75 bucks. It's all true. It's all true. It's just that I think the last thing I expected to find at the bottom of this machine were these little homemade holidays and a woman who's not making money off of them, but who cares about these more than I knew anyone could ever care about a holiday.

So we're back at Adrienne's storage locker, and we're still reading through that list of her holidates. June 18th, National Splurge Day. That's it, baby. That's the big one. Is that your Mona Lisa? My Mona Lisa probably is at National Smith Day. National Smith Day, that's to celebrate something completely ordinary, the last name Smith or Cooper Smith or whatever.

But there's other ones. Adrian flips the page and there's this list of holidays that just goes on forever. See, there's a lot. I'm just going to go fast. Okay. Ready? July 2nd, take a starving artist out to lunch day. July 9th, international teen idol day.

July 16th, sports club day. July 23rd, bell of the ball day. July 30th, king biscuit day. August 6th, national aunt and uncle day. Oh, that was a good one. August 13th, national cowards day. August 20th, going 30th, King Biscuit Day, August 6th, National Aunt and Uncle Day. Oh, that was a good one. August 13th, National Cowards Day, August 20th, Going Going Gone Day, August 27th, Universal Doorman Day, September 3rd, Hospital Tea Day, September 10th, International Makeup Day. That was Kenny Malone and Noelle King covering a lesser known industrial complex.

Is there another one we should cover? Tell us about it. You can email us at planetmoney at npr.org, or you can find us on social media at Planet Money. Today's show was originally produced by Daniela Vidal. It was edited by Bryant Erstadt. Today's rerun was produced by Corey Bridges with help from Gilly Moon. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. I'm Erika Barris. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

for helping to support this podcast.