January Holidays and National Days
A word search for every day of January 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
January, Day by Day
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New Year's Day
The new year arrives twenty-six times over, not once. Kiribati takes it first at UTC+14, and Baker Island takes it last, twenty-six hours behind.
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Happy Mew Year for Cats Day
Nobody domesticated the cat. Near Eastern wildcats moved in on the mice in the first grain stores and stayed, which is roughly the arrangement they are still offering.
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Tolkien's Birthday
Tolkien built the languages first. Middle-earth started as somewhere for them to be spoken, which is a strange way round to write a book and it worked.
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Newton's Birthday
Newton has two birthdays. England was still on the old calendar when he was born, so it was Christmas Day 1642 at home and January 4, 1643 everywhere else.
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National Bird Day
Feathers came before flight. Dinosaurs had them for warmth and display for millions of years before anything used them to get off the ground.
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Epiphany
The Bible never says there were three. It lists three gifts and does not count the visitors, and it does not call them kings either.
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Orthodox Christmas
Several hundred million people keep Christmas today. Their churches still run on the Julian calendar, where December 25 falls on our January 7.
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Earth's Rotation Day
On January 8, 1851, Léon Foucault hung a pendulum in a Paris cellar and watched the floor turn under it. It was the first direct proof you could stand and look at.
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Balloon Ascension Day
The first flight in America took off from a Philadelphia prison yard on January 9, 1793. George Washington watched, and handed the pilot a letter asking anyone who found him to be helpful.
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Houseplant Appreciation Day
Houseplants survive our rooms because most of them evolved on a rainforest floor, in permanent shade under a canopy. Dim and still is their normal weather.
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Milk Day
Most adults on Earth cannot digest milk, and the ones who can are the unusual case. The mutation is only a few thousand years old and it spread fast.
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Batman's Television Premiere
Batman arrived on television on January 12, 1966, twice a week. Wednesday ended on a cliffhanger and Thursday got you out of it. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.
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Rubber Ducky Day
Ernie's song about a rubber duck reached number sixteen on the Billboard chart in 1970, which is higher than most actual musicians manage.
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Ratification Day
The Revolutionary War formally ended on January 14, 1784, in a room in Annapolis that had spent weeks waiting for enough delegates to show up.
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The First Super Bowl
The first Super Bowl was not called the Super Bowl, did not sell out, and no complete recording of the broadcast survives.
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International Hot and Spicy Food Day
Chilli heat is not a taste. Capsaicin binds the receptor that reports burning, so the nerve reports a temperature that isn't there and the rest of you believes it.
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Benjamin Franklin's Birthday
Franklin never patented anything. He had the lightning rod, bifocals and a far better stove, and he gave all of them away on principle.
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Winnie the Pooh Day
There was a real bear. Winnie was a Canadian black bear at London Zoo, named after Winnipeg, and a small boy called Christopher Robin used to visit her.
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Edgar Allan Poe's Birthday
"The Raven" made Poe famous across America almost overnight, and he was paid nine dollars for it.
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Inauguration Day
The date moved because of a four-month gap. Presidents used to take office on March 4, and the winter of 1932 showed what that costs.
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Squirrel Appreciation Day
Squirrels plant forests by forgetting. They bury far more than they recover, and the ones they lose track of are how oak trees travel.
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Hot Sauce Day
Tabasco has been made on the same Louisiana salt dome since 1868, and the mash still sits in oak barrels for three years before anyone opens one.
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National Handwriting Day
The day is John Hancock's birthday, and it was invented by the people who sell pens. The line about signing large enough for King George to read without his spectacles was made up much later.
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Gold Discovery Day
James Marshall found gold in a millrace on January 24, 1848 and never got a share of it. He died broke, still arguing.
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National Irish Coffee Day
It was invented for passengers rescued from a flying boat. A chef at Foynes put whiskey in the coffee of a planeload of cold, frightened Americans who had turned back over the Atlantic.
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Republic Day
India chose January 26 on purpose. It was the date nationalists had declared independence for themselves twenty years earlier, with no authority to do it.
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Mozart's Birthday
Mozart was composing at five and had written more than six hundred works by the time he died at thirty-five. The catalogue numbers run from K.1 to K.626.
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Lego Brick Day
The modern brick was patented at 1:58 in the afternoon on January 28, 1958, and a brick made that day still clicks onto one made this morning.
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National Puzzle Day
The jigsaw was a teaching aid. A London mapmaker glued a map to wood in the 1760s, sawed along the borders, and sold it to schools as a way of learning geography.
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National Croissant Day
The croissant is Austrian. It arrived in Paris in 1839 with a Viennese artillery officer who had decided to open a bakery instead.
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Explorer 1
America's first satellite went up on January 31, 1958, four months after Sputnik, and found something nobody had gone looking for.
Other Months
Looking for today's puzzle? The word search of the day has the full story behind today's occasion and the week ahead. Or browse all word search puzzles.