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[IceWizard]

Tuesday 29 Nov 2016



Square Dancing Day



Square Dancing Day exists to celebrate the square dance form of folk dancing, and is a great excuse to get out and “Dosey Do”.

This fun, healthy and simple form of dance with a long history definitely deserves a holiday all of its own, and it has one!

The History of Square Dancing Day

Square Dancing has its roots in traditional English, Irish and Scottish folk dance. Square dances were first documented in 17th-century England .

They came to North America right along with the European settlers, where they were modified and improved over the years.

The Western American square dance is perhaps the most famous type of square dance worldwide; in fact, the suware dance is the official dance of 19 American states.

Square dancing is mainly associated with a romanticized image of the Old West, and cowboys wooing Southern belles during dances organized at saloons to celebrate various occasions.

The dance is accompanied by jolly, lively music on guitars, fiddles, accordions and bagpipes.

The dances normally form patterns of lines, circles and, as the name suggests, squares, with couples – male/female, female/female or male/male – taking a turn in every role.

In most American forms of square dance, the dancers are prompted through the square dance choreography to the beat of the music. Sometimes, this so-called “caller” is one of the dancers, but more commonly the “caller” is found on the stage with the band. Interest in square dancing, which had waned during the World Wars, experienced a revival in New York City in the 1950s, during the American folk music revival.



And



Electronic Greetings Day



You remember all of those sometimes cute, sometimes funny, and sometimes downright obnoxious electronic greeting cards that used to appear in your email inbox?

Well, if you hadn’t guessed it, there’s actually a day devoted to electronic greetings.

Fittingly, that day is known as Electronic Greetings Day. Origin of Electronic Greetings Day With technology growing to be an ever more important component of our day to day lives over the last few decades and the fact that it’s continuing to do so (no arguing – in all likelihood you’re reading this article on a computer, a smartphone, or a tablet), the advent of electronic greetings became inevitable.

You might remember all of those e-cards back in the late 1990s when everyone in the US was just starting to have a personal computer at home – those may seem so dated now, with their low-resolution graphics and all, but in their day it was quite an exciting thing to get an animated greeting card in your email.

These days, things like Facebook stickers and other electronic greetings dominate the field, but the concept remains more or less unchanged.

Electronic greetings are here to stay, and why not celebrate them with their own day?

Since any mention of exactly when Electronic Greetings Day first occurred seems to be unavailable, we’re going to venture a guess and posit that the occasion was created by those websites which sell e-cards – most likely sometime between the late 1990s and mid-2000s.