National Nothing Day is somewhat of an oddball day on the holiday calendar. That’s because it’s more accurately described as an anti-holiday. The entire purpose of this holiday is to not celebrate anything on this day. People are encouraged to not observe anything that might even be labeled as a holiday. Since this holiday falls on January 16th, that means that people observing this holiday are encouraged not to celebrate the other holidays that fall on this day—including Teacher’s Day, National Without A Scalpel Day, National Fig Newton Day, or any other one of the many holidays that fall on this date.

Another thing that we’d like to mention is that even though the word “national” is used in this holiday (um, non-holiday), it isn’t a nationally observed holiday as designated by an act of Congress. This means that more than likely, if this holiday falls on a weekday, then you’re still going to have to go to work.

The History Of National Nothing Day

Even though no one actually knows when this day was first invented, most accounts attribute this holiday to Harold Pullman Coffin. It’s believed that Mr. Coffin, who was a San Francisco Examiner columnist, was sick and tired of all the special interest groups laying claims to an ever-increasing number of days on the calendar. In his estimation, more and more holidays were being created, so in 1973, he decided to do something about it. This is when he created this non-holiday. Although this holiday wasn’t very popular in the beginning, it did gain some traction over the years. Unfortunately, it’s not as popular as other holidays, and that’s probably due to the fact that it’s kind of against human nature to observe a holiday by not observing a holiday.

Facts About Nothing & Nothingness

As we wrote up this holiday, we gave some serious thought to what facts we could include about this holiday. And that gave us a few problems, and it had us wondering how we could write facts about nothing. After some serious thought, and a lot of research, we came to the conclusion that we should just write facts about nothing and nothingness. So let’s go over those facts, so everyone reading this can learn everything there is to know about nothing.

Approximately 74% Of The Universe Is Nothing

If you look closely at the universe, the one thing that stands out is that there’s a lot more nothingness than there is anything else. Approximately 74% of the universe is made up of what scientists call dark energy, 22% is made up of dark matter, and the last 4% is baryonic matter. What is baryonic matter? It’s the atoms and the stuff made out of atoms that we come across every day. Wow! That’s a whole lot of nothing.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

Okay, we have to admit that we borrowed that phrase from the horror movie Alien, but it’s actually a tagline that contains quite a bit of truth. On Earth, we can make sounds such as talking or screaming by vibrating the air with our voice boxes. This creates a sound wave that other people can hear. In space, there’s no air; therefore, there’s no sound. So yes, Alien was right. No one in space can hear you scream.

Black Holes Aren’t Composed Of Nothingness

Many people seem to have the belief that black holes are made of nothing or that they’re merely holes in space. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Because they are the highest concentration of matter in the entire universe, caused by the gravitational pull of a collapsing star, they may quite literally be the opposite of nothing.

Virtual Particles Come From Nothing

Even though the universe is composed of mostly empty space—which we would say contains nothing—this empty space isn’t really empty. It’s filled with virtual particles, particles, and antiparticles, that pop into existence and then annihilate each other every few seconds or so. So empty space is not really empty, is it?

Customs, Traditions & Celebrations Of National Nothing Day

Since this is National Nothing Day, all that you have to do is to do nothing for this holiday. Of course, that can be a bit difficult nowadays considering the large number of tasks that people have to do on a daily basis. Another thing that makes observing (or, should we say, not observing) this holiday difficult is that we live in a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week world. With those things said, we guess that most people will celebrate this day the way they see fit. They will either just treat this holiday as a normal day without any thought given to performing any kind of celebratory act, or they will pull up a chair and do nothing for the entire day.