One of the shortcomings of growing up entirely in one culture is that you might never really understand some of the holidays celebrated in other cultures. December 9 might highlight something like that for those of us brought up outside of Sweden, where it’s Anna’s Day today. What that means in Sweden is a celebration for (or possibly of) everyone named “Anna”.
Annas aren’t the only Swedish celebrants throughout the year; the Name Day Calendar assigns a name to most days of the year. The year of names starts out with Svea, on January 2, and continues through Robert (June 7) and Sigrid (September 15), arriving at Sylvester on December 31. Nearly all the other days are assigned names as well. Not all names, though, have days. The list is updated every few years by the Swedish Academy — the same committee that picks the winners of the Nobel Prize. If your name isn’t on the list, what you evidently do (or can, if you wish) is pick some other day to celebrate your name independently.
But December 9 in Sweden isn’t just Anna’s Day; it’s also the day to start preparing lutefisk, a traditional part of Christmas dinner. The preparation isn’t particularly difficult; lutefisk is dried whitefish that has to be soaked for several days to be reconstituted. It’s a tradition that goes back millennia; fish was a staple food in that part of the world and drying was a reliable method of preserving food for the harsh winters. Geology might have something to do with it too; there aren’t any large salt deposits in that part of the world, so preservation by salting wasn’t easily possible.
Something that wasn’t accessible in North America until December 9, 1851, was visiting the gym. That’s the day the continent’s first YMCA was established, in Montreal. The YMCA had been founded in 1844 in London to provide a mixture of athletic and religious activities for, as the initials suggest, “young men.” By now they’ve expanded their focus to include every age and gender, and there are local YMCA organizations all over the world. They still feature indoor sports, though, and there’s even a sport that originated in YMCAs: futsal.
Futsal is an indoor version of soccer played on basketball courts, and it was invented in a YMCA in Uruguay in 1930. It’s been adopted widely enough that there are two worldwide governing bodies for the sport (including FIFA), there are national teams, two different World Championships, and regional tournaments. There’s even a world ranking of national teams (Brazil is currently ranked at the top).
If you’re going to attend a futsal match, you might go by car — and your trip would be much more difficult without December 9, 1868. That’s the day the world’s first traffic signals were installed, in London. They were semaphore arms modeled after railroad signals — for good reason; they were introduced by John Knight, who designed signaling systems for the railroad. Now, you might be thinking “traffic signals in 1868…surely there weren’t any automobiles in London in 1868?” And you’d be right; there weren’t. The traffic signals were intended for horse-drawn traffic, which evidently can get into a jam just as easily as cars can.
There was a minor drawback to the original traffic lights; they were entirely manual, so a policeman had to be stationed next to them constantly to direct the traffic. That wasn’t considered a problem (at first). After all, directing traffic had been one of the duties of the London police since 1722, when they were tasked with overseeing people and wagons crossing London Bridge. More of the lighted semaphores were planned to be installed around the city. But just a month later, the first one, which was right out side the House of Parliament, had some sort of a problem with its gas illumination and exploded. The officer who was, by necessity, standing right next to it was injured, and the whole project was shelved. The hiatus lasted decades, until automobile traffic in cities in Europe and North America began to clog the roads and traffic signals were reintroduced. The first electric one was developed in Utah by an inventor with a very appropriate name: Lester Wire.
Electricity conducted over wires changed a lot of things in the world, and a great deal of our current world was affected on December 9, 1968 when Douglas Englebart gave the Mother of All Demos, introducing the computer mouse, the graphical user interface employing windows, online communication, hypertext, collaborative editing, and videoconferencing. And it all depended on electricity conducted over wires.
Someone in the computer industry may have had another new fundamental idea in the past 52 years, but when you try to think of what that might be, you might come up as empty as the investigators of the Kecksburg Incident did in the aftermath of December 9, 1965. A bright fireball was seen streaking through the sky over Detroit, and residents of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania (southeast of Pittsburgh) reported that something crashed in the nearby woods. A meteor, a falling Soviet satellite, and other less plausible explanations were suggested, but when the police and Air Force searched the woods, they found absolutely nothing. Some of the explanations, as you’d expect, had to do with extraterrestrial visitors. But there was no evidence, and critics pointed out that there wouldn’t be any reason for a UFO to land outside Kecksburg. But then, since none of us grew up in the culture of another planet, we probably would never understand if the aliens just happen to call December 9th Kecksburg Day.
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