What Is Sweetest Day?
Never heard of it you say? That’s because it is primarily celebrated in the Midwest region.
Many people are familiar with Valentine’s Day, a day traditionally reserved for expressing romantic and familial love, often with chocolates. Sweetest Day, celebrated on the 3rd Saturday in October, is a tradition somewhat similar.
Sweetest Day was created by Herbert Birch Kingston, who worked for a confectioner company in Cleveland, Ohio. He felt that there were plenty of people, namely orphans and the poor, who didn’t quite get the attention they deserved. Thus in 1922, he inaugurated the first ‘Sweetest Day Of The Year’ where the Committee distributed over 20,000 boxes of candy to mostly, the underprivileged, orphaned children and the elderly. The tradition was so enjoyed that people often looked beyond philanthropy to treating their own friends or family to treats on Sweetest Day.
Over the years, the tradition, which began over 100 years ago, has spread to other parts of the country. Commercially, it has become a day for sweethearts to celebrate their love for each other.
Here is the original introduction for Sweetest Day that appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper on Sunday October 8, 1922:
“The Sweetest Day” of the Year is the 3rdSaturday of this month.
Love is always the dominant motif in a successful life. Most of us have love in our hearts, but too often it remains there, never manifesting itself before those who inspire it.
Perhaps the business of living in this day and age when every moment requires energy and exertion precludes the constant exhibition of sentiment. There are those of us who have mothers and fathers back there in the little home town or here for that matter. Life itself would not be too much of a sacrifice in their behalf if necessary, yet how few times do we really show them that we care.
And remember your glorious courtship when all the world seemed in tune. Years will never dim the sacred memory of those golden days. Your wife remembers the hundreds of little attentions you showered upon her then. Little things perhaps, but maybe she sighs to herself every once in a while, and yearns – and hopes.
The Sweetest Day in the year came into being because the founders recognized the eternal tendency of men and women to become so engaged in the rush and whirl of life and forget the finer, more appealing things.
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