In recent years, the popularity of national day celebrations has grown rapidly. Nearly every day, I see posts of people celebrating the various national day. I decided to join in the celebration for a week and see what would happen.

Day 1- Today I had a few choices of what national day to celebrate. There was serpent day; freedom day; get up day; and, my choice, Baked Alaska day. I chose Baked Alaska because I recently made it. By definition, Baked Alaska is a layer of sponge cake and ice cream, covered in meringue, and then cooked for a short time at a high temperature. I have attempted to make this dessert on two occasions. The first was a failure. I used chocolate sponge cake and a mixture of caramel and vanilla ice cream; however, when I attempted to make the meringue, it failed to form stiff peaks and then melted off the cake in the oven. This created a burnt sugary blob on the bottom of my oven that took several hours of cleaning to get off. I nearly swore off making it again, but seeing that it was going to be national Baked Alaska day, I made a second attempt. This time I used the same chocolate sponge, but used cookie dough ice cream. My meringue worked very well, and I elected to blow torch the meringue rather than bake. It turned out great.

Day 2- I had to choose from two days today- heavenly hash or Groundhog’s day. I decided to go with Groundhog’s day because I can’t just eat food for every national day. When I awoke I discovered that Punxsutawney Phil had seen his shadow, which scared him back into hibernation for six more weeks of winter. It certainly appeared that winter was going to stay, too; the “feels like” was a mere three degrees this morning. However, according to The Washington Post, winter is not going to last six more weeks because in the South, spring leaves are already appearing 20 days ahead of schedule. I’m going to hope that The Washington Post is right about this one.

Day 3- Today I chose national wear red day. My other choices were women’s physicians, carrot cake and Day the Music Died. Wearing red sounded pretty easy, but it was actually a bit difficult because I don’t own a lot of red. I ended up wearing a red plaid shirt over a white t-shirt. At school I didn’t really notice an abnormally large amount of red, so I’m guessing it wasn’t the most popular national day.

Day 4- I chose national homemade soup day. I chose that over create a vacuum and thank a mail carrier day. It was actually a very good choice because it ended up being quite chilly today. I failed a little bit on the challenge- rather than making soup, I got some at Panera. I got black bean soup, and it was really good!

Day 5- My choices today were world Nutella day, national shower with a friend day or national weatherperson’s day. I chose weatherperson’s, and for that I decided to watch the weather forecast. Luckily, the day was predicted to be very nice, with highs in the mid-30s and sunshine. And they were right. I didn’t think anyone would know that it was national weatherperson’s day, but on Good Morning America, I heard the meteorologist mention it.

Day 6- I had to make the difficult choice between lame duck and frozen yogurt day. Just kidding, it wasn’t a hard decision; fro-yo for life. After an unseasonably warm day, (57 degrees in February!), I drove over to Ghurtie’s Gourmet Frozen Yoghurt Cafe, and got some frozen yogurt with my friend, Olivia. For my yogurt, I had both vanilla and caramel pretzel. For toppings, I had pecans, maraschino cherries, cookie dough bites, white chocolate chips and four sour gummy worms. I thoroughly enjoyed my frozen yogurt; this was by far the most fun day so far, but also most expensive.

Day 7- I had the most choices of all my days today; fettucine alfredo, periodic table, send a card to a friend or safer internet day. I ruled out fettucine alfredo because I was trying to get away from the food ones. Periodic table and safer internet were eliminated because I didn’t really know how to celebrate them. That left me with send a card to a friend. I decided to send a thank you card to my friend, Olivia, the same one who went to Ghurtie’s with me yesterday. In my note, I thanked her for being a good pal. Then came the interesting part: addressing a letter. It’s actually quite sad because I couldn’t address a letter without looking up how. I did get it addressed correctly (I hope), and put it in the mailbox.
Overall, celebrating the national days was sort of fun, but a fair bit of work too. I liked some of the days, such as frozen yogurt (any excuse to get fro-yo is a good one). Others though were more work than it was worth, such as sending a card to a friend. For anyone wanting to try out celebrating national days, I would recommend jotting down the days that sound fun or mean something to you, and then celebrate those.
Photos by Allie Schmitt-Morris and Gabby Skopec