How This ACD Pair Celebrated a Holiday Every Day in 2021

Every day is cause for celebration. There's a national holiday for just about anything. Ice cream for breakfast, handwriting, weeding your garden, the Richter scale, escargot, pawn brokers, playing cards. The list is truly endless.

Jason Goldberg and Allie Carr, associate creative directors at creative agency Erich & Kallman in San Francisco, tackled a lengthy personal project in 2021. The pair celebrated a recognized holiday every single day of 2021 and dubbed the project "Every Day Holiday."

"It took us about six months to plan and fill up the calendar with holidays," says Carr. "There are anywhere from two to 10 recognized holidays on any given day. We chose the ones that were most interesting/fun/doable to us."

Jason and Allie created a social media presence and website, where a giant whiteboard kept track of holidays celebrated. There's also an explainer video with highlights from their journey and TikTok recap videos. 

The most challenging aspect of the project was celebrating each holiday on the actual day. "We didn’t do any pre-celebrating or content capturing beforehand," says Goldberg. "Every celebration had to happen on the correct day, which created a really interesting restriction and forced us to get really creative. Too windy to go whale watching on World Whale Day? OK, guess we have to pivot and watch Free Willy at home." 

World Bee Day

National Artichoke Day

Another added challenge, of course, was that they both have full-time jobs. "And we all know how busy advertising is without a side project," Goldberg adds.

The project took the pair throughout the Bay Area, San Diego, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, and Richmond, Virginia.

Some of their favorite holidays included:

• World Cancer Day. They convinced San Francisco City Hall to light the building in World Cancer Day colors—blue and orange.

• Read Across America Day. Jason and Allie built a Little Free Library for a preschool.

• May Day. "For the celebration of the Spring Equinox, we visited a commune in the middle of nowhere," Carr tells Muse. "We danced around a maypole, learned how to skin a goat, and danced in a drum circle. It was straight out of Midsommar minus all the scary stuff. They were the nicest, warmest people ever."

Obscure holidays that the pair celebrated included:

• Bad Poetry Day. "We went to an open mic night and read the worst poems we could possibly write," says Goldberg. "There was a pretty big crowd, and we didn’t tell anyone we were celebrating bad poetry day."
• Text Your Ex Day. "This one was … interesting," says Carr.
• Mario Day. They dressed up as Mario and Luigi and drove around San Francisco in tiny yellow go-karts.