Is National Simon Day the same as Saint Simon's feast day?

No. The Western church keeps the feast of Saint Simon the Apostle on 28 October and the Eastern church on 19 June, while National Simon Day falls on December 8. No source connects the two.

Who started National Simon Day and why is it on December 8?

The day belongs to everyone who shares the name, and December 8 is simply the date it is kept on. Nobody has been identified as starting it, and no source anywhere gives a reason for that particular date.

National Simon Day

Next celebratedTuesday, December 8, 2026

Simons share a name English reached for when it needed a stand-in: the fool in the nursery rhyme, the leader in the playground game, the man in the play who has to prove he is himself.

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Last updated September 3, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEDecember 8

OBSERVED INInternationally

CATEGORYNames

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

Not documented

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

A December date that no record explains.

National Simon Day circulates on holiday-listing sites and through social media each December, marking people who share the name. No founder, proclamation or registration has been identified for it, and no source gives a reason for the December 8 date.

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

INTRO

English made Simon a word for sin and a word for integrity

Around the year 1200 English picked up the noun simony, the sin of buying or selling sacred things. It is named after a person: Simon Magus, the Samaritan magician who tried to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from Peter and was refused. National Simon Day belongs to a name English has been borrowing for other jobs for eight centuries.

The dictionary did not stop there. By 1730 Simple Simon meant a fool. In 1815 English produced simon-pure, of untainted purity or integrity, taken from a stage Quaker who is impersonated by another character and believed only once he has proved his identity.

So one name now carries a sin, a fool and a byword for honesty, depending on which entry you open. What it does not carry is any record of who gave it a day, or why that day falls in December.

ORIGINS

Simon Day history

INTRODUCTION

In the English poll tax returns of 1377 to 1381, the earliest national record of who was called what, John alone accounted for about 35% of the men counted. The top five names between them covered some 79% of the male population. Simon sat in the top fifteen.

It did not stay there. By the early modern period Simon had dropped out of that fifteen, alongside Adam, Hugh, Geoffrey and Ralph. No source in the record says what moved it.

CHAPTER 01

The names the Reformation left behind

The Cambridge Group's account, following the name scholar Withycombe, is that Protestantism favoured Old Testament names over New Testament ones, because the second group carried an association with popery. Simon is a New Testament name several times over, borne by the man who carried the cross and by the leading apostle. That is a suggestion about a whole class of names, not a proven account of this one.

CHAPTER 02

What the language did instead

The language kept finding other work for it. A Boston newspaper printed the earliest known Simon says in 1842, in a column that treated the game as already familiar. Word histories reports that the name was probably picked for the alliteration, and the French version of the game uses a different one entirely, Jacques a dit.

CHAPTER 03

A day with nothing behind it

None of this explains December 8. The day arrives in the record with no author attached to it. A full-text search of the United States Federal Register returns nothing at all for the name, while control searches for other observances return dozens of documents each.

What can be dated is the listing, not the day. The earliest trace anyone has located is an archived listing page from August 2022, and that timestamp records when a page was published, not when people began marking the date. The gap is in the paperwork, not in the observance.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Earliest national picture of forenames

The English poll tax returns of 1377 to 1381 are the earliest national record of who was called what, and Simon is among the medieval names later recorded as leaving the top fifteen.

A comedy names a character Pure

Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife is published in London, introducing the Quaker character Simon Pure.

Salvaged dollars and real ones

The Connecticut Courant contrasts discoloured coins raised from a wreck with the real Simon Pure, in one of the earliest known uses of the phrase.

Simon says reaches print

A column in the Boston Morning Post carries the earliest known printing of the phrase, treating the game as something readers already knew.

France plays it as Jacques

A French youth club manual prints the earliest located instance of Jacques a dit, the same game run under a different name.

A phone called Simon

The BellSouth and IBM Simon Personal Communicator reaches the American market on 16 August, sold as the world's first cellular communicator.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Simon Day by the Numbers

8th: Boys' name rank, England and Wales 1974
63: Boys named Simon, England and Wales 2025
230th: Boys' name rank, United States 2025
50th: Boys' name rank, France 2025

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why National Simon Day Matters

EVIDENCE

Simon topped the male names of Roman-era Palestine, ahead of Joseph.

Richard Bauckham ranked the male names in Tal Ilan's lexicon of Jewish names from Roman-era Palestine and found Simon first, ahead of Joseph, Lazarus and Judas. He used that distribution to test whether the names in the Gospels match the population those books describe, a job a common name can do precisely because it is common.

SPREAD

It is a name with a local form almost everywhere

Behind the Name records Simon in current use as a given name in thirteen languages, from French and Swedish to Armenian and Georgian. Each has kept its own version, among them Szymon in Polish, Simao in Portuguese and Semyon in Russian.

CULTURE

A playground formula became consumer electronics

Milton Bradley introduced its electronic memory game Simon just after midnight on 15 May 1978 at Studio 54, with a four-foot model of it hung over the dance floor. Smithsonian magazine describes the toy as a chip-driven version of the kindergarten game Simon Says.

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

Simon is Greek for he who hears.

The truth

The hearing sense is Hebrew. Simon goes back to Shim'on, from shama, he heard. There is a separate ancient Greek name spelled almost the same way, and the two have long been confused, but that one comes from simos, snub-nosed.

The myth

Simon the Apostle and Simon Peter are the same man.

The truth

They are two different apostles. Britannica records that the epithet attached to Simon the Zealot, Kananaios, may have been an attempt to distinguish him from Simon Peter.

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe National Simon Day

Look up the three Simon words

Open a dictionary at simony, Simple Simon and simon-pure and read the three entries in one sitting. They cannot all describe the same kind of person.

CHECK

Check the name in your national birth data

The British, American and French statistics agencies all publish free name files going back more than a century. Find the year Simon did best where you live.

PLAY

Play a round of Simon Says

Take the leader's chair and watch how quickly a room stops listening to the words and starts listening for the name. The leader's authority is the entire joke.

READ

Read the scene that gave English a word

Word histories reproduces it from the play's own text, down to the servant's line: There is another Simon Pure enquireth for thee, Master. The guardian's verdict is the line worth the trip: one of these must be a Counterfeit, but which I cannot say.

TELL

Tell a Simon what the name has been through

The record behind it runs from medieval tax rolls to last year's birth registers, with a detour through the dictionary. Most people carrying the name have never been told any of it.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Simon Day?

1 / 8

Which English word is named after a man called Simon in the Book of Acts?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing found, so schools, banks and offices stay open as usual.

COLOPHON

Sources

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

15sources

5primary records

9independently dated

Primary records

Office for National Statistics2025-07-31

Top 100 baby names in England and Wales: historical data

Top-100 rankings for boys and girls at ten-yearly intervals from 1904, the series in which Simon reaches eighth place in 1974 and is absent before the 1950s and after the 1990s.