The Book and the Rose

First. I have something to add my last week's post green-section: the trees. During the last week a hint of green has appeared on most of the trees. It also means, that birch pollen is everywhere (hey, there's yellow for you). Which sucks. Because it means the allergy season has properly started for me too.

Ok. To today's topic. I should've written about it last week, but I only heard about it on Wednesday. And then I was sure you're gonna write about this, because it's one of those things that I immediately knew I had to write about, but maybe you haven't heard about this then.

So. Last Wednesday, meaning April 23rd, it was St. George's day. Which I assume you knew, him being the patron saint of the scouts and all.
On Wednesday, my facebook wall got filled with pages posting things like "Happy international book day!", or "Happy day of the book and the rose!" which isn't all that big a deal. It seems to me that once a week there's an international shark day or DNA day or penguin day or, you know, something. Because there are a lot of cool things that have a day named for them.
But then I got a message from a friend asking if I was back home yet (at this point I was still at our parents') and I answered no, asked why. The answer was that it is the day of the book and the rose.
This is when I started googling, because apparently I didn't know what that actually meant.

The day of the book and the rose is a day celebrated in Catalonia, Spain, on St. George's day. It is like a Valentine's day for them, except they don't give chocolates or pink fluffy stuff or anything pointless like that to the people they love.
They give books and roses.
Which I think is amazing.

(The following information about the history I took from, you guessed it, Wikipedia.)

Giving roses to girls on St. George's day (or back then the day of the rose) is an old tradition, dating from the medieval times. The book thing is more recent, from the beginning of the 20th century, when a bookseller decided it's a day on which William Shakespeare and Miguel Cervantes died (which turns out not to be all that accurate).
Anyway, since then, people have given other people books, too. Mostly the tradition is, that men give women a rose (different colors mean different things), and women give men books. (Honestly, I'd rather take a book than a rose.) Apparently half of a year's book sales in Catalonia occur on that day.

Thanks to this tradition starting to spread internationally, in 1995 UNESCO adopted it as the world book day (or the world book and copyright day).

I wanted to tell you about this, because I think that having a day with a tradition of giving each other books is one of the most beautiful things I've run into lately. Just think about what the world would be like, if people decided to screw the Valentine's day chocolates and jewellery, and instead gave books to each other once a year.
I think that would be pretty great.

~matu