There are a number of holidays on December 23, making an interesting mixture of serious, less-than-serious, and “are they serious” events. Starting off in the less-than-serious category is Festivus. If you’ve heard of it, that’s probably because of the Seinfeld TV show, where the December 18, 1997 episode introduced the holiday as something George Costanza’s father had created. It seemed like something the Seinfeld writers must have come up with, but actually Festivus was real; it was a holiday celebrated by the family of one of the writers, Dan O’Keefe.

The real story is that O’Keefe’s father, Daniel, invented the holiday sometime in the mid-1960s. Daniel O’Keefe was a writer and editor who worked at Readers Digest for most of his career. He was also a scholar who held a PhD and published the book Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic. The O’Keefes’ version of Festivus differed a bit from the Seinfeld edition; instead of the Festivus Pole on the TV show, the original featured a clock, in a bag, nailed to the wall. In his book The Real Festivus, Dan O’Keefe explained that it didn’t have to be the same clock or the same bag, but it was always nailed to the same wall. His father never explained what the point was.

It’s not clear whether the O’Keefe family still celebrates Festivus, but thanks to Seinfeld plenty of other people do. They tend to use the Festivus Pole rather than the clock in the bag, but the Airing of Grievances seems to be a popular inclusion.

There is no official airing of grievances on Tibb’s Eve, though. It’s a fairly informal holiday commemorating the beginning of the Christmas season, celebrated in Newfoundland. Saint Tibb was a character who appeared in English plays in the 1600s. The character was a woman of somewhat loose morals whose function in the plays was comic relief — there was no real “Saint Tibb.” But the term “Tibb’s Eve” did arise at the time — like “the twelfth of never” or “a month of Sundays”, “Tibb’s Eve” just meant a time that was never going to arrive. You might have heard it in something like “Don’t lend Old Grommit any money, he only pays you back on Tibb’s Eve!”

Eventually the phrase made its way across the Atlantic, where in Newfoundland and Labrador it began to mean a date “neither before nor after Christmas.” Apparently that slowly evolved to “before Christmas”, because around the middle of the 20th Century it became regarded as the beginning of the Christmas season. It became known as the first night during Advent when having a drink (or two) was called for (Advent was a serious, pious time when people would typically abstain from alcohol until Christmas day). In any case, in Newfoundland Tibb’s Eve finally settled on the evening of December 23, and more lately it has (of course) started to be commercialized by bars and taprooms. Thanks to social media, Tibb’s Eve has begun to spread beyond Newfoundland, so keep an eye out to see if it appears in your area.

As far as I know, Tibb’s Eve hasn’t yet arrived in Oaxaca, Mexico — but they don’t need it, since they have an existing December 23 holiday to celebrate there: the Night of the Radishes.

Tom Bawcock’s Eve takes place in a village called Mousehole, Cornwall.

The Night of the Radishes in Oaxaca dates back to the 1800s, after radishes were introduced to Mexico by the Spanish. They grew very well there, and farmers began to carve the larger ones to attract attention in the market. Then in 1897 — on December 23, of course — a formal radish-carving competition was begun. It’s still going on today, when the carved radishes are specially grown and highly fertilized. In fact they’re even chemically treated, so you can’t actually eat them an more (although normal edible radishes are still abundant there too). The radish carving and assembly of elaborate scenes (out of the carved radishes) all happen today. Contestants include both adults and children, and they all compete for cash prizes. But if you want to see the entries, you have to stand in line — carved radishes only last a few hours, so if you don’t see them by tonight, you’ve lost your chance.

You might want to miss your chance to sample the signature dish at Tom Bawcock’s Eve, which takes place in a village called Mousehole, Cornwall, in England each December 23. The dish is “stargazy pie”, which is a sort of casserole of fish, eggs, and potatoes, with the fish heads protruding.

The traditional story is that the village of Mousehole was starving, and a brave fellow named Tom Bawcock went out to sea in the midst of a huge storm to catch fish to feed everyone. There probably never was a person named “Tom Bawcock”, though. The name “Bawcock” once meant a fine chap. It appears in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in fact. And the name “Tom” used to be used the same way, to mean any man, sort of like “John Doe” nowadays in the US. Nobody really knows when the festival itself originated, but it was first mentioned in a magazine in 1927. It’s not entirely unique; there’s a Christmas-season tradition in Kent with fish on the menu, and there is — or used to be — a “Feast of the Seven Fishes” celebrated around the same time of year in Italy.

Yet another December 23 holiday is HumanLight, a Humanist holiday. It’s observed by candle-lighting ceremonies, exchanging gifts, doing charity work, and celebrating together. It was created by members of the New Jersey Humanist Network in the 1990s, with the first event held in 2001. They chose December 23 in order not to interfere with other holidays in the season — but they obviously missed a few.

One of the holidays they missed is observed only in Ukraine: it’s Operational Servicemen Day. It’s one of a series of holidays throughout the year to celebrate specific specialties in the Ukranian Armed Forces. They include Air Assault Forces day, Finance Officers day, Military Intelligence day, and so on — there are 15 of them in all. But Operational Servicemen Day may be the most enigmatic, simply because it’s not necessarily clear what an operational serviceman’s responsibilities might be. It’s a good match for a holiday created featuring a unexplained clock in a bag nailed to a wall.

We’re lucky in this day and age that we can get news about the weird and unusual holidays that are happening in relatively obscure corners of the world. There are, of course, a couple of foundational developments that make it possible for us to get this news. Digital computers, for one, are essential, and December 23 has something to say about that too — it was December 23, 1947 that the transistor was first demonstrated at Bell Labs. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain made the presentation, and nine years later they, along with their team leader William Shockley, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

Once you have computers, of course, you need to connect them. Maybe you’ve heard of TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol and IP, the Internet Protocol, that form the basis for communication via the Internet. It turns out that they come from December 23, too, in a way. Robert Kahn was one of the engineers, along with Vint Cerf, who originally proposed them, and today is his 83rd birthday. If you know him, wish him a happy Festivus!