All Your Countdowns, All at Once

Fun Facts About These Holidays

New Year's Day

January is named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and doorways, usually shown with two faces — one looking back, one looking forward. Julius Caesar's Julian calendar made January 1 the official start of the year in 45 BC.

Valentine's Day

The romantic side of Valentine's Day mostly comes from medieval poets like Chaucer in the 1300s, not ancient Rome. Pope Gelasius I had already set February 14 aside in the 5th century to honor a martyred St. Valentine — the romance was added centuries later.

St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick was a real 5th-century figure: a Roman Briton kidnapped as a teenager and enslaved in Ireland, who later returned to spread Christianity there. The first recorded St. Patrick's Day parade wasn't in Ireland at all — it was held in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1601.

Easter

Easter's date was fixed by the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD as the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox — which is exactly why it lands on a different date every year (and why this countdown has to calculate it fresh each time).

Independence Day

The actual vote for American independence happened on July 2, 1776, and John Adams predicted that date would be the one celebrated. The Declaration of Independence itself wasn't formally adopted until July 4 — which is why we celebrate then instead.

Halloween

Halloween's roots trace back roughly 3,000 years to Samhain, a Celtic festival marking the point when the boundary between the living and the dead was believed to grow thin. Bonfires and costumes were originally meant to ward off wandering spirits.

Thanksgiving

The "first Thanksgiving" was a three-day feast in Plymouth in 1621 shared between English colonists and the Wampanoag. It didn't become an annual national holiday until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln declared it so — after decades of campaigning by one woman, Sarah Josepha Hale.

Christmas

December 25 isn't tied to any record of Jesus's actual birth date. Pope Julius I chose it in the 4th century, likely so the new holiday would line up with — and gradually replace — the existing Roman winter festival of Saturnalia.

New Year's Eve

The famous Times Square ball drop began on New Year's Eve in 1907, replacing a fireworks display the city had just banned as a fire hazard. The first ball was made of iron and wood and weighed 700 pounds.

How This Countdown Works

Most of the holidays on this list fall on a fixed calendar date every year — Valentine's Day is always February 14, Independence Day is always July 4, Halloween is always October 31. For those, this countdown simply finds the next upcoming occurrence and counts down to midnight.

Thanksgiving isn't a fixed date at all — it's defined by a rule: the fourth Thursday of November. That means the exact day shifts from year to year, though it always lands between November 22 and 28. This wasn't always guaranteed: in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier to give retailers more shopping days before Christmas, a change so unpopular it earned the nickname "Franksgiving." Congress settled the matter for good in 1941, permanently fixing Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday of November.

Easter is the trickiest one. Its date has been defined since the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD as the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. But the Church doesn't use the real astronomical moon and equinox for this — it uses fixed "ecclesiastical" versions calculated centuries ago, which can drift a day or two from the actual sky. That's why this countdown, like every Easter calculation, relies on a formula called the computus rather than just checking a calendar.

Custom countdowns you add work the same way as the holidays: if you check "Repeats every year," it rolls forward to the next occurrence of that month and day, just like a holiday. Leave it unchecked and it counts down to that exact date, once.