Gregory started as a Greek word for staying awake, and the pope who took it put it on the calendar the world still dates by. December 20 belongs to Greg, the clipped form; it was the first date France ever wrote in that calendar.
Dated social posts show National Greg Day being kept on December 20 in 2023, 2024 and 2025. No founder, proclamation, registrar entry or sponsoring organisation could be found for it.
National Greg Day sits on a date that, in one country, once did not happen. France spent the autumn of 1582 on the old Julian calendar and changed over in the middle of December. Sunday the ninth was followed straight by Monday the twentieth, and the ten dates in between were simply skipped.
The calendar that swallowed those days belongs to a Gregory. Pope Gregory XIII put his name on the reform, and the twentieth of December was the first date France ever wrote in it.
Nothing joins the holiday to the pope. This day arrived unsigned, with nothing on file about who began it or why it landed where it did. The coincidence is worth a minute anyway, because Greg is a clipped Gregory, and Gregory started out as a Greek word for staying awake.
The name reached England on a mission. Pope Gregory I, who took the office in 590, organized the journey that carried Augustine of Canterbury into Kent. By the middle of the twelfth century Gregory was popular in England and Scotland.
The name has also been misread. The Latin Gregorius was at times confused with gregarius, the word behind gregarious, which comes from grex, meaning flock or herd. So a name built on wakefulness has sometimes been taken for a name about flocks.
Sixteen popes have taken the name on election, running from Gregory I through Gregory XVI. The last of them was born Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari and reigned until 1846. The name has not been chosen since.
The pope who put the name on the calendar was born Ugo Boncompagni, in Bologna, in 1502. He was elected in 1572 and chose to reign as Gregory. The calendar most of the world now dates by carries a name he picked, not the one he was born with.
His reform had one target, and it was Easter. The commission pulled the spring equinox back to March 21, the date it had held at the First Council of Nicaea. Gregory was aided chiefly by Luigi Lilio, who died in 1576, and by the Jesuit mathematician Christopher Clavius.
The bull Inter gravissimas, which means In the Gravest Concern, landed on February 24, 1582. October 4 was the last day of the old count that year. The morning after it was called October 15.
Many Protestants read the new calendar as the work of the Antichrist and refused it. Anti-Catholic propaganda matched the dragon on Gregory's papal insignia to the seven-headed beast in the Book of Revelation. Russia held out until 1918.
Against all of that, the holiday is almost weightless. National Greg Day has never been claimed, and its trail holds dated posts rather than paperwork. People keep it regardless, which for a name day is most of the job.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Gregorian named church music first. The calendar borrowed the word later.
English had a Gregorian before it had the Gregorian calendar. The word described church music from about 1600, after Gregory I, and only picked up its calendar sense in the 1640s.
On December 20, 2024, Edinburgh Live, a digital news title covering Edinburgh, greeted its readers with the day. Almost a year later a Facebook group put out an advance notice telling members that National Greg Day falls on December 20 and that preparations should begin.
Gregory ranks 23rd on the Social Security Administration's published table of 1960s boys' names, with 187,495 births behind it. The name sits far lower on the list today, but a great many American Gregorys were born inside that one decade.
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No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing, so it is a normal working day. A search of the US Federal Register returns nothing under that name.
COLOPHON
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