Holiday Calendar

National Joy Day

Next celebratedMonday, December 7, 2026

The muscle that crinkles the eye corners answers to real feeling and not to will, which is why a frozen smile reads as less felt. Joy Day asks you to notice what genuinely moves you.

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEDecember 7
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYHealth
SUBCATEGORYSelf-Care
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

A day nobody has claimed.

No founder, sponsoring organisation, registration or launch record for National Joy Day has been located, and the origin accounts in circulation name no responsible person or body. The earliest dated use of the name on December 7 that this research could open and verify is a newsletter issue published on 7 December 2023, which sets a floor rather than a beginning.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday
INTRO

The one muscle that ignores your orders

You can arrange your mouth into a smile whenever you like. The ring of muscle at the outer corner of your eye is harder to recruit. It answers to real feeling, and a deliberate request from you is not that.

Researchers eventually found a way to switch it off and see what happened. They photographed patients before and after a cosmetic treatment that paralysed exactly that muscle and smoothed the crow's feet away, then asked hundreds of strangers to rate the smiles. The same people, smiling the same way, were rated as less felt and less spontaneous once the muscle was frozen.

They also looked about a year younger, and no more attractive than before.

That is the strange bargain sitting under a day about joy. The part of a smile that reads as real is the part you do not control, and it is the first thing to go.

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ORIGINS

Joy Day history

CHAPTER 01

A muscle that will not take orders

The idea that a real smile lives in the eye and not the mouth is more than 160 years old. It originated with the French anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne.

What he wrote in 1862 is still being tested. The lower part of the orbicularis oculi, he said, "does not obey the will; it is only brought into play by a true feeling, by an agreeable emotion."

It is a claim with an edge on it. Duchenne was not describing a pleasant quirk of anatomy. He was describing a part of the body that will not participate in a lie.

Darwin took the observation up ten years later. Then it sat, largely unbothered, for most of a century.

CHAPTER 02

What December 7 does not have

The holiday is a different story, and a much shorter one. No founder has been identified. No organisation sponsors it, registers it, or runs a campaign for it.

Two origin accounts circulate anyway. One says the day was first observed in 2005 to push back against negativity in the media, but it names no person and no group, and cites nothing. The other says the day began as a tribute to people named Joy, and rests on a single page that misstates its own year.

Neither is a record. Both are stories that acquired confidence by being repeated.

The absence is measurable, which is unusual for an absence. The United States Federal Register carries 34 presidential documents naming National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, the observance that shares this date. National Joy Day returns none at all.

Compare a near namesake. Comfort Keepers, a home care company, says on its own site that it created the National Day of Joy in 2019 and registered the last Wednesday in June. That day has a founder, a year, a registrar and a hashtag.

December 7 has a name and a date, and the earliest use of both that can be opened and dated is a newsletter published on 7 December 2023. That is a floor set by the limits of a search, not a birthday.

TIMELINE

Timeline

A muscle that disobeys

Duchenne de Boulogne reports that the lower part of the eye muscle does not answer to the will, and moves only for genuine feeling.

Darwin takes it up

Darwin picks up Duchenne's observation in his own work on how emotion shows in the face.

The marker gets a name

Ekman, Davidson and Friesen name the Duchenne marker, turning a 128-year-old note into a research programme.

Positive feeling as recovery

Fredrickson and colleagues publish the undoing effect, showing amusement and contentment speed cardiovascular recovery from anxiety.

Twenty-seven varieties

Cowen and Keltner resolve 27 distinct varieties of reported emotional experience from a library of short video clips.

The tell is switched off

Etcoff and colleagues rate the same patients before and after botulinum toxin paralysed the eye muscle, and the smiles read as less felt.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Joy Day by the Numbers

393
People rating the treated smiles
32
Patients photographed before and after
2,185
Videos used to map emotions
324,066
Individual emotion judgments collected

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Joy Day

Grief wears the same mark as delight

The crinkle is not a joy detector. There is considerable evidence the same contraction turns up in sadness and grief, and across four experiments Duchenne sad faces were not rated as any more genuine or sincere than sad faces without it. It only made them look sadder.

Freezing the muscle moved happiness and almost nothing else

When the eye muscle was paralysed, ratings of the patients' sadness, anger, disgust, fear and surprise showed no significant change. The one emotion that moved was happiness. The muscle is doing a specific job, not a general one.

Emotions do not have edges

A study its authors describe as covering the richest array of reported emotional experiences studied to date found the boundaries between categories are fuzzy rather than discrete. The gradients run in named steps: anxiety to fear to horror to disgust, and calmness to aesthetic appreciation to awe.

Every emotion they tested turned out to be real

The same study targeted 34 emotion categories, joy among them, and all 34 were reported at significantly above-chance rates in response to at least one video. None of the candidate feelings turned out to be a word without an experience behind it.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why National Joy Day Matters

Play

Play looks like time off. In the theory it is how reserves get built.

In the broaden-and-build theory, positive feelings are not rewards. They are instructions. Each one opens a different urge, and joy sparks the urge to play while interest sparks the urge to explore. Play looks like time off. In the theory it is how a person accumulates reserves that can be drawn on later.

Recovery

It shortens the time stress stays in the body

Researchers made 170 people cardiovascularly reactive with an anxiety task, then played them a film. The ones who watched something amusing or contenting recovered faster than those who watched neutral or sad films. A second study of 185 people ruled out the tidy explanation that one feeling had simply replaced another.

Scale

It anchors the biggest axis we sort feelings along

When researchers mapped the structure of reported emotional experience, the dominant axis to fall out of the data was the one separating calmness and joy from horror and empathic pain. Joy is not a small or decorative state. It sits at one end of the main axis along which people sort feeling.

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe National Joy Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Watch the eyes, not the mouth

Look at photographs of people you love and find the ones where the skin at the outer corner of the eye has gathered. That is the part of the expression nobody posed.

PUT

Put something funny after the hard thing

The undoing-effect studies played people an amusing film after an anxiety task, not before it. Order the day so something genuinely diverting follows the part you are dreading.

NAME

Name the feeling more precisely

Joy, contentment, amusement and calmness are not interchangeable in the research, and their borders are gradients rather than lines. Try naming which one you actually had today.

FOLLOW

Follow the urge to play

If joy is the emotion that opens the urge to play, treat the urge as the point rather than the distraction. Take the detour, keep the game going, stay for the second round.

CHECK

Check which joy day you mean

Two different days are easy to confuse. National Joy Day falls on December 7. The National Day of Joy is a separate observance on the last Wednesday in June.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Joy Day?

1 / 8

What did Duchenne say the lower eye muscle will not do?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing anywhere that could be found. An exact-phrase search of the United States Federal Register and the GovInfo archive returns no documents naming it.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

8sources
6primary records
7independently dated
Primary records
Frontiers in Psychology2021-01-12
A Novel Test of the Duchenne Marker: Smiles After Botulinum Toxin Treatment for Crow's Feet Wrinkles
Rates photographs of 32 patients before and after botulinum toxin paralysed the muscle at the outer eye, reporting that the untreated smiles read as more felt, spontaneous, intense and happy, and that treatment changed apparent age but not attractiveness.
View source
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B2004-09
The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions
Sets out the theory that distinct positive emotions open distinct urges, with joy sparking the urge to play, and that the resulting broadened states build durable personal resources.
View source
Motivation and Emotion2000
The Undoing Effect of Positive Emotions
Two experiments, of 170 and 185 participants, showing that amusing and contenting films speed cardiovascular recovery from anxiety-induced reactivity, and ruling out simple emotional replacement as the explanation.
View source
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences2017-09-05
Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients
Maps reported emotional experience using 2,185 videos and 324,066 individual judgments, resolving 27 distinct varieties, testing 34 emotion categories including joy, and finding the boundaries between them fuzzy rather than discrete.
View source
Office of the Federal Register2025-12-10
National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, 2025
One of 34 presidential documents in the Federal Register naming the December 7 observance that is federally proclaimed, used here as the same-date comparison against which National Joy Day returns no documents at all.
View source
Comfort Keepers
National Day of Joy
The company's own account of creating the National Day of Joy in 2019 and registering the last Wednesday in June, used here to distinguish that separate observance from the December 7 day.
View source
Additional coverage
University College London2020-03
Observers perceive the Duchenne marker as signaling only intensity for sad expressions, not genuine emotion
Traces the eye-crinkle idea to Duchenne de Boulogne in 1862 and quotes his claim that the muscle does not obey the will, records Darwin's uptake and the marker's naming by Ekman and colleagues in 1990, and reports four experiments finding the marker adds genuineness to smiles but only intensity to sad faces.
View source
A Substack from A Guy Named Joe2023-12-07
NATIONAL JOY DAY UPDATES
A dated newsletter issue published on 7 December 2023 under the day's name, providing the earliest verifiable use of National Joy Day on December 7 that this research could open, and noting that National Cotton Candy Day shares the date.
View source
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