National Monica Day

She was born at Thagaste and died at Ostia in 387, waiting for a ship back to North Africa. Her husband Patricius was a pagan who reportedly had a violent temper. Augustine was seventeen and studying rhetoric in Carthage when his father died.

Her funerary epitaph was written by Anicius Auchenius Bassus and survived in old manuscripts, but the stone itself vanished. It came back in the summer of 1945, when two boys digging in a courtyard beside the church of Santa Aurea hit it. Her tomb had already been moved to the Basilica of Sant'Agostino in Rome.

Monica entered the American top 100 in 1964 and stayed there every single year until 1997. Those thirty-four years are the only ones it has ever spent that high.

Then January 1998 arrived. Ann Carrns opened a Wall Street Journal report that October, syndicated in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, with a plain line: "Ever since Monica S. Lewinsky burst into the headlines in January, life has been trying for Monicas both famous and obscure." The name went from 79th in 1997 to 105th in 1998, and it has never been back inside the top 100.

The holiday has none of that paper behind it. Four holiday-listing sites were checked against the Internet Archive.

Not one holds a saved copy of a Monica page, though their other holiday pages are archived years back. The name has a paper trail running back to the fourth century, and its holiday has none.