December 22 Holidays

National Short Person Day was established to celebrate people under 5’4″ — the average U.S. female height — and to push back against the subtle cultural biases that favor height in leadership, attractiveness research, and salary studies. National Cookie Exchange Day celebrates the holiday tradition in which participants bake one type of cookie in large quantities, bring them to a party, and leave with an assortment of everyone else’s baked contributions — a practice that dates to mid-20th-century American community cookbooks. Forefathers’ Day marks December 22, 1620, when the Pilgrims of the Mayflower first set foot on Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts — a date commemorated by the Old Colony Club of Plymouth since 1769. Mathematics Day is observed on December 22 — the birthday of Srinivasa Ramanujan, born December 22, 1887 — the self-taught Indian mathematician who produced extraordinary results in number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions and died at 32.