September Holidays and National Days
A word search for every day of September 2027. Each date has its occasion, a line on what the day is about and a free puzzle to go with it, so you can plan the month's puzzles ahead or pick a theme for any day you like. Every puzzle prints in easy, medium or hard, or plays online against a friend.
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Word Search of the Month
September, Day by Day
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American Chess Day
There are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe. The number is about ten to the hundred and twentieth power, and it has a name: the Shannon number.
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The Great Fire of London
The Great Fire destroyed thirteen thousand houses and eighty-seven churches, and the official death toll was six.
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National Skyscraper Day
Louis Sullivan's rule — form follows function — was written about buildings that had just become possible, because of two things arriving together: the steel frame and a lift that would not fall.
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Macadamia Nut Day
The macadamia is Australian, but almost every tree grown commercially descends from a handful of seeds sent to Hawaii in the 1880s.
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Voyager 1
Voyager 1 launched on September 5, 1977 and is still transmitting from beyond the solar system. Its signal now takes about twenty-three hours to reach us.
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Labor Day
The first Labor Day parade, in New York in 1882, went ahead on a Tuesday. Thousands of workers gave up a day's pay to march.
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Brazil Independence Day
Brazil became independent when the heir to the Portuguese throne declared it — against his own father — and then made himself its emperor.
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Star Trek Day
The network hated the first pilot and did something almost unheard of: it paid for a second one. The main objection was a woman as second-in-command.
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The First Computer Bug
On September 9, 1947 operators pulled a moth out of a relay in a Harvard computer, taped it into the logbook and wrote "first actual case of bug being found".
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Alpaca Day
Alpacas were bred for fleece and llamas for carrying. Two species, two jobs, and the Spanish conquest nearly destroyed both — the herds were killed and the breeding records were oral.
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Make Your Bed Day
Mattresses were rare enough to be inherited. A medieval will might list a bed by name among the major bequests, and Shakespeare famously left his wife the second-best one.
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Grandparents Day
National Grandparents Day was the idea of Marian McQuade, a West Virginia mother of fifteen. Jimmy Carter signed it into law in 1978 and set it on the first Sunday after Labor Day.
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Fortune Cookie Day
Fortune cookies are not Chinese. They are Japanese, were sold in California before the First World War, and were served in Chinese restaurants only after Japanese-American bakers were interned in 1942.
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National Coloring Day
There was no word for blue in most ancient languages. Homer's sea is wine-dark, and scholars spent the nineteenth century wondering whether the Greeks were colour-blind.
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Hispanic Heritage Month Begins
Hispanic Heritage Month starts in the middle of September because five Central American countries mark their independence on September 15: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
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Mexican Independence Day
This is the actual independence day, not the fifth of May. It is marked at eleven at night, because that is roughly when a village priest rang his church bell and started the war.
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Constitution Day
The Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787 by thirty-nine men, with three delegates present refusing. It is the shortest written constitution of any major country and the oldest still in use.
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National Cheeseburger Day
The cheeseburger was reportedly invented by a sixteen-year-old cook who dropped a slice of cheese on a burger by accident and decided not to scrape it off.
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Talk Like a Pirate Day
Pirates did not talk like pirates. The accent is one actor's — Robert Newton, playing Long John Silver in 1950, leaned into his own West Country burr and invented the voice of every pirate since.
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National Pepperoni Pizza Day
Pepperoni does not exist in Italy. Ask for it there and you will be given peppers — *peperoni* is the Italian for them, and the sausage is an Italian-American invention from about 1919.
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International Day of Peace
On Christmas Eve 1914, soldiers on both sides of the Western Front climbed out of their trenches, exchanged food and buttons, and buried their dead together. The generals made sure it never happened again.
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The Fall Equinox
The equinox does not really cut the day in half. The atmosphere bends sunlight, and sunrise counts from the sun's first edge, so both ends run long.
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International Day of Sign Languages
American and British Sign Language cannot understand each other. ASL grew out of the French system, so it has more in common with signing in Paris than in London.
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The Little Rock Nine
Nine teenagers were escorted into an Arkansas high school by the 101st Airborne in 1957. The president had sent the army because the state's own governor had sent the National Guard to keep them out.
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National Lobster Day
Lobster was prison food. It was so abundant in colonial New England that feeding it to servants more than twice a week was written into contracts as something they could refuse.
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Johnny Appleseed's Birthday
John Chapman planted apples nobody could eat. Seedling apples are almost always sour and the orchards he founded were for cider, not for fruit.
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World Tourism Day
The word tourist is about two hundred years old and started as an insult. It distinguished people who travelled to say they had from travellers, who were understood to be doing something serious.
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International Poke Day
Poke means "to cut crosswise into pieces" in Hawaiian. It is a verb about knife work, not a recipe, and for most of its history it had no rice under it.
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Michaelmas
Michaelmas was one of the four days the English year turned on. Rents fell due, servants were hired, harvests were reckoned up, and the legal and university terms still start from it.
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National Hot Mulled Cider Day
Cider in America means the unfiltered juice; in England it means the alcoholic drink. It is the same word doing two jobs, and the split happened during Prohibition.
Other Months
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