It’s Friendship Day today, and while you’re busy exchanging greetings and gifts with your best friends around the world, here’s something to make the day more meaningful for you. We’ve compiled some lesser-known facts about this special day.
- The idea of Friendship Day started as a fresh marketing strategy in the 1930s. It was Joyce Hall, founder of Landmark cards in 1919, who came up with the idea of celebrating the first Sunday of August every year as Friendship Day.
- As the trend caught on, in 1935, the United States Congress announced the first Sunday of August as National Friendship Day.
- It was a Paraguayan called Dr Artemio Bracho who proposed the idea of having a World Friendship Day and on July 30, 1958 Paraguay celebrated the first World Friendship Day.
- As the trend became more popular, the United Nations General Assembly declared July 30 as the official International Friendship Day on April 27, 2011.
- To mark the 10th anniversary celebrations of International Friendship Day, The Beatles released their hit song ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ in 1967.
- Residents of Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Uruguay celebrate friendship every year on July 20.
- The National Women’s Friendship Day was first celebrated in 1999, by the Kappa Delta Sorority in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S on the third Sunday of September.
- By 2009, the entire month of September started being celebrated as International Women’s Friendship Month.
- Winnie the Pooh was chosen in 1998 as the Ambassador of Friendship at the United Nations by Nane Annan, the wife of then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
- The cult sitcom ‘Friends’ arrived at its title after being suggested names such as ‘Friends like Us,’ ‘Six of One, ‘Across the Hall,’ ‘Once Upon a Time in the West Village,’ and ‘Insomnia Café.’ Well, it would have been a hit no matter what they would have named it!