Today is December 21 2014

National French Fried Shrimp Day: More
National Kiwifruit Day. More

• Winter Solstice: More
  
• National Flashlight Day: More
• National Homeless Persons Memorial/Remembrance: More
  Same day as the Winter Solstice (Longest night of the year).
• Crossword Puzzle Day: More
  First published in the newspaper the 1913.
• International Dalek Remembrance Day: More
  First appeared in 1963.
• Forefathers Day: More
  Celebrated mostly in New England from 1769.
• Humbug Day: More
• Phileas Fogg Win A Wager Day: More
  Around the world int 79 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. (1872)
• Yala: More
  In Iran, Between December 20-22. Celebration of food, drink and poetry.
• Look on the Bright Side Day: More
• World Snowboarding Day: More
  Same day as the Winter Solstice
• National Haiku Poetry Day: More
  Celebration of a style of Japanese poetry
  Same day as the Winter Solstice

• In 1620, William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims land on what is now known as Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
  From Wikipedia: 'On December 21, 1620, the first landing party arrived at the site of what later became the settlement of Plymouth. Plans to immediately begin building houses, however, were delayed by inclement weather until December 23. As the building progressed, twenty men always remained ashore for security purposes, while the rest of the work crews returned each night to the Mayflower. Women, children, and the infirm remained on board the Mayflower; many had not left the ship for six months. The first structure was a "common house" of wattle and daub, and took two weeks to complete in the harsh New England winter. In the following weeks, the rest of the settlement slowly took shape. The living and working structures were built on the relatively flat top of Cole's Hill, and a wooden platform was constructed atop nearby Fort Hill to support the cannon that would defend the settlement.
  
  During the winter, the Mayflower colonists suffered greatly from lack of shelter, diseases such as scurvy, and general conditions onboard ship. Many of the able-bodied men were too infirm to work; 45 out of 102 immigrants died and were buried on Cole's Hill. Thus, only seven residences (of a planned nineteen) and four common houses were constructed during the first winter. By the end of January, enough of the settlement had been built to begin unloading provisions from the Mayflower. In mid-February, after several tense encounters with local Native Americans, the male residents of the settlement organized themselves into military orders; Myles Standish was designated as the commanding officer. By the end of the month, five cannons had been defensively positioned on Fort Hill. John Carver was elected governor to replace Governor Martin.
  
  On March 16, 1621, the first formal contact occurred with the Indians (or Native Americans). A Native American named Samoset, originally from Pemaquid Point in modern Maine, walked boldly into the midst of the settlement and proclaimed, "Welcome, Englishmen!" He had learned some English from interacting with English fishermen and trappers (most probably from Bristol) operating in the region. It was during this meeting that the Pilgrims learned how the previous residents of the Native American village of Patuxet had died of an epidemic thought to be smallpox. They also discovered that the supreme leader of the region was a Wampanoag Native American sachem (chief) by the name of Massasoit; and they learned of the existence of Squanto (also known by his full Massachusett name of Tisquantum), a Native American originally from Patuxet. Squanto had spent time in Europe and spoke English quite well. Samoset spent the night in Plymouth and agreed to arrange a meeting with some of Massasoit's men.
  
  Massasoit and Squanto were apprehensive about the Pilgrims. In Massasoit's first contact with the English, several men of his tribe had been killed in an unprovoked attack by English sailors. He also knew of the Pilgrims' theft of the corn stores in their landings at Provincetown. Squanto had been abducted in 1614 by English explorer Thomas Hunt and had spent five years in Europe, first as a slave for a group of Spanish monks, then in England. He had returned to New England in 1619, acting as a guide to explorer Capt. Robert Gorges. Massasoit and his men had massacred the crew of the ship and had taken in Squanto.
  
  Samoset returned to Plymouth on March 22 with a delegation from Massasoit that included Squanto; Massasoit joined them shortly thereafter. After an exchange of gifts, Massasoit and Governor Carver established a formal treaty of peace. This treaty ensured that each people would not bring harm to the other, that Massasoit would send his allies to make peaceful negotiations with Plymouth, and that they would come to each other's aid in a time of war.
  
  On April 5, 1621, after being anchored for almost four months in Plymouth Harbor, the Mayflower set sail for England. Nearly half of the original 102 passengers had died during the first winter. As William Bradford wrote, "of these one hundred persons who came over in this first ship together, the greatest half died in the general mortality, and most of them in two or three months' time". By November 1621, only 53 pilgrims were alive to celebrate the harvest feast which modern Americans know as "The First Thanksgiving". Of the 18 adult women, 13 died the first winter while another died in May. Only four adult women were left alive for the Thanksgiving.
  
  Several of the graves on Cole's Hill were uncovered in 1855; their bodies were disinterred and moved to a site near Plymouth Rock'.
  - At Wikipedia: More
  - On YouTube: More
• In 1898, Scientists Pierre and Marie Curie discover radium.
  From Wikipedia: 'Radium was discovered by Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre Curie on 21 December 1898, in a uraninite sample. While studying the mineral earlier, the Curies removed uranium from it and found that the remaining material was still radioactive. They separated out an element similar to bismuth from pitchblende in July 1898, that turned out to be polonium. They then separated out a radioactive mixture consisting mostly of two components: compounds of barium, which gave a brilliant green flame color, and unknown radioactive compounds which gave carmine spectral lines that had never been documented before. The Curies found the radioactive compounds to be very similar to the barium compounds, except that they were more insoluble. This made it possible for the Curies to separate out the radioactive compounds and discover a new element in them. The Curies announced their discovery to the French Academy of Sciences on 26 December 1898. The naming of radium dates to about 1899, from the French word radium, formed in Modern Latin from radius (ray): this was in recognition of radium's power of emitting energy in the form of rays.
  
  In 1910, radium was isolated as a pure metal by Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne through the electrolysis of a pure radium chloride (RaCl2) solution using a mercury cathode, producing a radium–mercury amalgam. This amalgam was then heated in an atmosphere of hydrogen gas to remove the mercury, leaving pure radium metal. The same year, E. Eoler isolated radium by thermal decomposition of its azide, Ra(N3)2. Radium metal was first industrially produced in the beginning of the 20th century by Biraco, a subsidiary company of Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) in its Olen plant in Belgium.
  
  The common historical unit for radioactivity, the curie, is based on the radioactivity of 226Ra'.
  - At Wikipedia: More
  - On YouTube: More
• In 1913, The first crossword puzzle (with 32 clues) was printed in the New York World.
  From Wikipedia: The title for the world's first crossword puzzle is disputed. Some such puzzles were included in The Stockton Bee (1793–1795), an ephemeral publication. The phrase "cross word puzzle" was first written in 1862 by Our Young Folks in the United States. Crossword-like puzzles, for example Double Diamond Puzzles, appeared in the magazine St. Nicholas, published since 1873. Another crossword puzzle appeared on September 14, 1890, in the Italian magazine Il Secolo Illustrato della Domenica. It was designed by Giuseppe Airoldi and titled "Per passare il tempo" ("To pass the time"). Airoldi's puzzle was a four-by-four grid with no shaded squares; it included horizontal and vertical clues.
  
  Crosswords in England during the 19th century were of an elementary kind, apparently derived from the word square, a group of words arranged so the letters read alike vertically and horizontally, and printed in children's puzzle books and various periodicals.
  
  'A crossword is a word puzzle that normally takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of white and black shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. In languages that are written left-to-right, the answer words and phrases are placed in the grid from left to right and from top to bottom. The shaded squares are used to separate the words or phrases.
  
  On December 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne, a journalist from Liverpool, England, published a "word-cross" puzzle in the New York World that embodied most of the features of the genre as we know it. This puzzle is frequently cited as the first crossword puzzle, and Wynne as the inventor. Later, the name of the puzzle was changed to "crossword".
  
  Although Eugene T. Maleska is usually credited with the first crossword phrase (as opposed to a single word) in the New York Times, an 1862 puzzle in the Lady's Book had phrases that are considered modern such as the expression "I did it"'.
  - At FamousDaily: More
  - At Wikipedia: More
  - On YouTube: More
• In 1914, The first feature-length silent film comedy, 'Tillie's Punctured Romance' was released. (Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and Charles Chaplin.
  From Wikipedia: 'Tillie's Punctured Romance is a 1914 American silent comedy film directed by Mack Sennett and starring Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand, Charlie Chaplin, and the Keystone Cops. The picture was the first feature-length motion picture produced by the Keystone Film Company, and is the only one featuring Chaplin.
  
  The film is based on Dressler's stage play Tillie's Nightmare by A. Baldwin Sloane and Edgar Smith. Tillie's Punctured Romance is notable for being the last Chaplin film which he neither wrote nor directed, as well as the first feature-length comedy in all of cinema. In it, Chaplin plays an entirely different role from his Tramp character, which was relatively new at the time'.
  - At FamousDaily: More
  - At Wikipedia: More
  - On YouTube: More
• In 1937, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves' is released. It is the first feature length animated film.
  From Wikipedia: 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a 1937 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and originally released by RKO Radio Pictures. Based on the German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, it is the first full-length cel animated feature film and the earliest Disney animated feature film. The story was adapted by storyboard artists Dorothy Ann Blank, Richard Creedon, Merrill De Maris, Otto Englander, Earl Hurd, Dick Rickard, Ted Sears and Webb Smith. David Hand was the supervising director, while William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, and Ben Sharpsteen directed the film's individual sequences.
  
  Snow White premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937, followed by a nationwide release on February 4, 1938. It was a critical and commercial success, and with international earnings of $8 million during its initial release briefly assumed the record of highest- grossing sound film at the time. The popularity of the film has led to it being re-released theatrically many times, until its home video release in the 1990s. Adjusted for inflation, it is one of the top ten performers at the North American box office.
  
  At the 11th Academy Awards, Walt Disney was awarded an honorary Oscar, and the film was nominated for Best Musical Score the year before. In 1989, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry and is ranked in the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films, who also named the film as the greatest American animated film of all time in 2008. Disney's take on the fairytale has had a huge cultural impact, resulting in popular theme park attractions, a video game, and a Broadway musical'.
  - At FamousDaily: More
  - At Wikipedia: More
  - On YouTube (trailer): More
• In 1968, Apollo 8 is launched from the Kennedy Space Center, placing its crew on a lunar trajectory for the first visit to another celestial body by humans.
  From Wikipedia: 'Apollo 8, the second human spaceflight mission in the United States Apollo space program, was launched on December 21, 1968, and became the first manned spacecraft to leave Earth orbit, reach the Earth's Moon, orbit it and return safely to Earth. The three-astronaut crew — Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders — became the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit, the first to see Earth as a whole planet, the first to directly see the far side of the Moon, and then the first to witness Earthrise. The 1968 mission, the third flight of the Saturn V rocket and that rocket's first manned launch, was also the first human spaceflight launch from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, located adjacent to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
  
  The mission was originally planned as Apollo 9, to be performed in early 1969 as the second test of the complete Apollo spacecraft, including the Lunar Module and the Command/Service Module in an elliptical medium Earth orbit. But when the Lunar Module proved unready to make its first test in a lower Earth orbit in December 1968, it was decided in August to fly Apollo 8 in December as a more ambitious lunar orbital flight without the Lunar Module. This meant Borman's crew was scheduled to fly two to three months sooner than originally planned, leaving them a shorter time for training and preparation, thus placing more demands than usual on their time and discipline.
  
  Apollo 8 took three days to travel to the Moon. It orbited ten times over the course of 20 hours, during which the crew made a Christmas Eve television broadcast where they read the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. Apollo 8's successful mission paved the way for Apollo 11 to fulfill U.S. President John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. The Apollo 8 astronauts returned to Earth on December 27, 1968, when their spacecraft splashed down in the Northern Pacific Ocean. The crew was named Time magazine's "Men of the Year" for 1968 upon their return'.
  - At Wikipedia: More
  - On YouTube: More
• In 1974, Harry Chapin earns a #1 hit with, Cat's In The Cradle.
  From Wikipedia: '"Cat's in the Cradle" is a 1974 folk rock song by Harry Chapin from the album Verities and Balderdash. The single topped the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1974. As Chapin's only No. 1 hit song, it became the best known of his work and a staple for folk rock music. Chapin's recording of the song was nominated for the 1975 Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011'.
  - At Wikipedia: More
  - On YouTube: More

Tomorrow we have two food holidays, 'National French Fried Shrimp Day'
[The Hankster says] My favorite way of eating shrimp. and 'National Kiwifruit Day';

Tomorrow is the 'Winter Solstice'.
[The Hankster says] It will be the shortest day and the longest night of the year. The Southern Hemisphere will have to wait until June for theirs. Many of the holidays below are celebrated on this day. I marked them with an *.

Tomorrow is '*National Flashlight Day'.
[The Hankster says] Shine a little light on the longest night of the year.

When the sun rises and you turn off that flashlight, you can honor 'Look on the Bright Side Day'.

We have an awareness day tomorrow. It will be '*National Homeless Persons Memorial/Remembrance Day'.
[The Hankster says] The longest night is also the night with the longest period of cold. This day recognizes those who will have to make it through that period and those who have died in the past, from such conditions.

Get outside tomorrow. It will be '*World Snowboarding Day'.
[The Hankster says ] In Texas we will have to settle for a skateboard or cardboard box.

If you are a poet and can speak Japanese, tomorrow is for you. It will be '*National Haiku Poetry Day'.

What is a word that starts with a 'C' and ends with 'word'. If you got that far you may continue with 'Crossword Puzzle Day'.
[The Hankster says] The first one was published in a newspaper in 1913. It gave clues, like the one above and was in the form of a triangle with no black squares.

Tomorrow is 'International Dalek Remembrance Day'.
[The Hankster says] If you don't know what a Dalek is, then just move on. Others may like to know that they first started making Dr. Who's life interesting on this day in 1963.

Tomorrow is also 'Forefathers Day'. []The Hankster says It is celebrated mostly in New England from 1769. You may remember that the Pilgrims have been floating around in the harbor for a few weeks now. This day is the one on which they decided to come ashore.

Tomorrow we celebrate 'Around the world in 79 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds.Day' or Phileas Fogg Win A Wager Day'.
[The Hankster says ] Well I think it was rounded off to 80 days. The journey ended on December 21 1876.

Roger Babson once said 'Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present.'
[The Hankster says] While I see the good in preparing for the future, I don't think the now, need be so entirely dedicated to it. Learn and plan, but enjoy what is now. Let us look back and see if the past was enjoyed on December 21. We are still here, so someone must have done some planning and made some preparation.

In 1620, William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims land on what is now known as Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
[The Hankster says that they most likely did not land on the rock and it wasn't even mentioned in logs or diaries of the time, but it was mentioned in literature some 120. years later.

In 1898, Scientists Pierre and Marie Curie discover radium.

In 1913, The first crossword puzzle (with 32 clues) was printed in the New York World.

In 1914, The first feature-length silent film comedy, 'Tillie's Punctured Romance' was released. (Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and Charles Chaplin.

In 1937, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves' is released and was the first feature length animated film.

In 1968, During the Apollo program: Apollo 8 is launched from the Kennedy Space Center, placing its crew on a lunar trajectory for the first visit to another celestial body by humans.

In 1985, Harry Chapin earns a #1 hit with, Cat's In The Cradle.

No. 1 song

• I Feel Fine - The Beatles: More
  'Ringo' has been displaced by 'I Feel Fine', which will hold the no. 1 spot until December 26 1964, when 'Come See About Me (The Supremes)', takes over.

Top movie

• Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte More
  Having displaced 'Father Goose', it will be there until the weekend box office of December 27 1964 when, 'My Fair Lady', takes over.

• FamousBirthdays.com: December 21 Birthdays More
• FamousDaily.com: December 21 History More
• History.com: Historical Events on 21st December More
• HistoryOrb.com: Famous Deaths on 21st December More
• On-This-day.com history 21st December More
• On-This-day.com music history 21st December More
• Wikipedia.com: History December 21 More

Food:
Buckwheat Month
Tomato and Winter Squash Month
Worldwide Food Service Safety Month
National Egg Nog Month
National Fruit Cake Month
Root Vegetables Month
Other:
World Aids Month
National Write A Business Plan Month
Safe Toys and Gifts Month
National Tie Month Universal Human Rights Month
National Drunk and Drugged Driving (3D) Prevention Month
Colorectal Cancer Education and Awareness Month National Tie Month

December is:

December origin (from Wikipedia): ' December gets its name from the Latin word decem (meaning ten) because it was originally the tenth month of the year in the Roman calendar, which began in March. The winter days following December were not included as part of any month. Later, the months of January and February were created out of the monthless period and added to the beginning of the calendar, but December retained its name. '

' December is the first month of meteorological winter in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, December is the seasonal equivalent to June in the Northern hemisphere, which is the first month of summer. D ecember is the month with the shortest daylight hours of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the longest daylight hours of the year in the Southern Hemisphere. '

December at Wikipedia: More

If you couldn't afford 90 cents for a movie ticket, 50 years ago, or your 45 RPM record player was broke, you might watch one of these shows on TV.
From this Wikipedia article: More

Best selling books of 1964 More

• Astronomy Picture of the Day: More
• NOAA: - National Hurricane Center - Atlantic Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook: More
• Listen to Old Radio Shows: (streaming mp3 with schedule) More
• NASA TV: (video feed) More
  NASA TV schedule: More
• Public Domain eBook Links

  Sites for downloading or reading free Public Domain eBooks. Available in various formats. More

• Podcast: A Moment of Science. Approximately 1 minute general science facts.
  Home page: More
  RSS: More
• Podcast: The Naked Scientists. Current science, medicine, space and other science
  Home page: More
  RSS: More
• Podcast: Quirks & Quarks. Current science news.
  Home page: More
  RSS: More
• Articles and videos: Universe Today. Current space and astronomy news.
  Home page: More
  RSS: More
• Old Picture of the Day - "Each day we bring you one stunning little glimpse of history in the form of a historical photograph."
  Home page: More
  RSS: More

Below, are listed several holiday sites that I reference in addition to other holiday researches.

US Government Holidays

• 2014 Postal Holidays More
• 2014 Official Federal Holidays More

Holidays Worldwide

• List of holidays by country More
• Holidays and Observances around the World More