Inside the National Day Calendar office

The National Day Calendar operates out of a converted storefront on Main Street in Mandan, North Dakota — population 24,000. The office has six desks, a coffee maker from roughly 1998, and a bulletin board covered in thank-you notes from small businesses whose day, the team declared, is now a day.

Marlo Anderson, the founder, is a radio guy. He started the calendar in 2013, partly as a bit — a nationwide rundown of what to celebrate each morning — and partly because he saw a void. Nobody else was organizing this stuff.

Each month the team reviews around twenty submissions. They come in from trade groups, authors, restaurants, individuals. Most get rejected. The bar is informal but real: the day has to feel durable, not transactional. "Corporate Product X Day" is dead on arrival. "National Bologna Day" — submitted by a third-generation deli in Pittsburgh — passed in an afternoon.

The criteria Marlo described to me, over a plate of hotdish in a diner two blocks from the office, were refreshingly human: Does it make you smile? Is there a story? Has someone's grandmother been doing this for forty years? If so, it's probably a day.

The staff of six includes a writer, a designer, a submissions coordinator, and Marlo's wife, who runs operations. They take the work seriously without taking it solemnly. On the day I visited, they'd just approved National Hug Your Dog Day, submitted by a shelter in Kansas. "A good one," the coordinator said. "Clean. Wholesome. Not a brand."

The most startling thing about spending time at the National Day Calendar is how quickly you stop finding the whole enterprise absurd. Within two days I had internalized the vocabulary. I caught myself thinking things like, "Oh, that'd be a good Tuesday." This, I suspect, is the point.