Megan Garber takes stock of the micro-holidays catalogued at Daysoftheyear.com, including (just today!) Garage Sale Day, Rice Pudding Day, Book Lovers Day, and Bowling Day:

Micro-holidays, which teeter somewhere in the center of the continuum between universality and irrelevancy, are political. They do what all holidays will, in the end: convene our attention around a cause. But they are different from official holidays in one crucial way: They are opt-in.

In that, they are in some ways the temporized equivalent of all those “What Kind of Person Are You?” Internet quizzes, or of those “You Know You Grew Up in the ’90s” demolisticles: They’re about finding communities of like minds within the social chaos of the Internet. Every year, people will discover delightfully nerdy new ways to celebrate National Grammar Day – and they will do that in part because they are self-identified grammar nerds. Who are sharing a thing with other self-identified grammar nerds. The exchanging of grammar-mistake pet peeves and the starting of heated fights about the Oxford comma – some traditional ways of celebrating the day – say something about who they are as people. It says something, also, about what they want to share as people. It suggests the thing that has been true all along, but that the Internet is reminding us of anew: that being and sharing are often the same thing.

(Image via Terry Chay)