Happy International Day of Nowruz and happy 10th birthday of the blog!

Nowruz Mubarak! Happy International Day of Nowruz AKA Persian New Year and happy 10th birthday of the blog!* Since I have concentrated on celebrating this blog's birthday the past three years while downplaying Persian New Year, something I foreshadowed in 2017 when I wrote "I'm going to miss celebrations of Nowruz at The White House," I'm going to reverse my emphasis by sharing material about the holiday first, beginning with BBC News' Nowruz: How 300m people celebrate Persian New Year from 2019.

About 300 million people across the world will celebrate Persian New Year - or Nowruz - on Thursday.

The 3,000-year-old festival begins on the first day of the year in the Iranian calendar, and is also a celebration of Spring.

People in countries including Iran, Tajikistan, Turkey and Iraq will be welcoming the start of the year 1398, explains the BBC's Samar Salekipour.

Since 2019 in the common era calendar was 1398 on the Persian Calendar, that means that that today (or actually yesterday, because the actual celebration is on the Vernal Equinox, not today) is now 1400, the end of one century and the beginning of another. That alone justifies the attention to the holiday that I've neglected to give it the past three years.


The BBC News video did a good job of portraying how Nowruz is celebrated during normal times. These are not normal times. France 24 English shows how people are celebrating Nowruz in Persian New Year Nowruz festivities go online because of the pandemic.


I didn't see a message from The White House, but I did see Prime Minister Trudeau's message on Nowruz, so I'm sharing that.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wishes everyone celebrating a happy and healthy Nowruz.

Nowruz Mubarak to you, too, Mr. Prime Minister.


Ten years ago today, I posted First post: Why this blog? Since then, I've written 4,673 entries including this one. That's worthy of a bigger celebration than I'm giving it today. Don't worry. I will give the anniversary the attention I always do, with statistics on Tuesday, followed by retrospectives on (Throwback) Thursdays and (Flashback) Fridays all the way through April. That will begin after I celebrate World Water Day tomorrow. Stay tuned.

*Today is also the 15th birthday of Twitter, sort of. I'll celebrate that event when I write about the blog's year on Twitter next month.