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28 December: what is celebrated today
Amid the Christmas glow and before the end of the year, 28 December arrives with a unique mixture of solemnity, humour and self-reference. It is the day when biblical history meets popular laughter, and the calendar, with an ironic wink, celebrates itself. Today the world remembers, on the one hand, Holy Innocents’ Day, a date that began as a tragedy and became a festival of jokes and laughter; and, on the other, the curious International Day of World Days, an observance as metaphorical as it is amusing, dedicated to those who fill the year with commemorative dates. Two c
Holy Innocents’ Day
The origin of Holy Innocents’ Day lies in one of the darkest episodes of the Gospel: King Herod’s order to kill the children of Bethlehem to prevent the birth of the Messiah. Since then, the Church has remembered those little martyrs every 28 December, a symbol of innocence taken away. In churches, the colour purple evokes mourning and compassion; in popular tradition, however, that ancient sadness gradually became a celebration of the absurd, a miniature carnival that laughs to ward off the world’s cruelty.
During the Middle Ages, that transition took shape in the so-called feast of fools, a day when order was inverted: young clerics dressed up, sang irreverent songs and parodied ecclesiastical authorities. That subversive laughter survived the centuries and is now expressed in jokes and pranks, false headlines, imaginary phone calls or paper figures stuck to people’s backs. Laughter, after all, became an act of shared innocence.
Each country has given it its own stamp: in Spain, the Gala Inocente, Inocente raises funds for children’s causes, and in Ibi, Alicante, the Els Enfarinats festival turns the streets into a battleground of flour and good humour. In Venezuela, the colourful dance of the Zaragozas honours both sacred memory and secular joy. In Mexico, amid jokes and prayers, the day combines the religious and the popular. Thus, 28 December continues to remind us that humour, properly understood, can also be a form of resistance.
International Day of World Days
And as if the calendar wanted to laugh at itself, this same date also hosts the International Day of World Days. A meta celebration, invented to pay tribute to those who create, spread and give meaning to all those observances that populate the year. From the UN to local associations, from the writers who write about them to the public who share them, everyone forms part of this great symbolic fabric that turns time into a narrative.
We live surrounded by days devoted to noble, curious or extravagant causes: peace, theatre, hugs, the earth, cats, poetry and bicycles. Each brings a spark of awareness or a smile amid routine. That is why this ‘day of days’ acts as a mirror celebrating human creativity and its desire to give meaning to the passage of time.
On 28 December, then, the calendar looks in the mirror and laughs at its own excess, while the world alternates laughter and remembrance, parody and prayer. Between saints, jokes and observances, it reminds us that living is also this: learning to take joy seriously and to look at solemnity with humour.