Happy Sweetest Day! Let’s Put The Midwestern Holiday On The National Map

This year, Sweetest Day falls on October 19. If you’re not in the midwest, you probably don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. But I think everyone needs to celebrate the holiday.

Sweetest Day was originated in Detroit just over a century ago, primarily as a promotion for local candy companies. After a brief suspension of the day during World War I (due to sugar rationing), the celebration became an official one, celebrated on the third Saturday of October, by the late 1920s.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a good hour shuttling between three different northern California stores looking for Sweetest Day cards for my two daughters. Ever since they were little, I have sent them cards for every holiday that crosses my mind.

Not just their birthdays and Christmas, but every holiday — Memorial Day. Labor Day. Arbor Day. Bastille Day! (I studied French in high school and college.) It’s become our “thing” over the years.

That shopping day a few weeks ago, I was shocked to find not a single Sweetest Day card at my local Walgreens or Target. When the cute, pimply faced millennial working at the Hallmark store looked at me curiously and said “I don’t know what Sweetest Day is, sir,” — “SIR?” — I yanked my iPhone out of my pocket and Google’d “Sweetest Day” in an exaggerated fit of pre-geriatric rage.

As it turns out, the young man’s lack of knowledge was more than justified. Standing in that Hallmark store, I learned that Sweetest Day is an exclusively Midwestern holiday.

I was gobsmacked. My family always celebrated it when I was growing up in Detroit, and I’d thought EVERYBODY did. My dad bought my mom a card and a gift for Sweetest Day every year, and I verbally sparred with my mom almost every year about why I was the only one of her four children who never gave her a card.

Click here to read MPC’s full feature, including why, in Trump’s America, we should all celebrate Sweetest Day!