I have just used the term Red Letter Day on my Facebook account to announce the fact that my new style website goes live today. After I pressed send I realised that I did not truly know why we use the term.

So I looked it up and found to my surprise that it has a very interesting history. According to Wikepedia:

“A red letter day (sometimes hyphenated as red-letter day or called scarlet day in academia) is any day of special significance. The term originates from Medieval church calendars. Illuminated manuscripts often marked initial capitals and highlighted words in red ink, known as rubrics. The First Council of Nicaea in 325 decreed the saints’ days, feasts and other holy days, which came to be printed on church calendars in red.

The term came into wider usage with the appearance in 1549 of the first Book of Common Prayer in which the calendar showed special holy days in red ink. Many current calendars have special dates and holidays such as Sundays, Christmas Day and Midsummer Day rendered in red colour instead of black.
On red letter days, judges of the English High Court (Queen’s Bench Division) wear, at sittings of the Court of Law, their scarlet robes (See court dress). Also in the United Kingdom, other civil dates have been added to the original religious dates. These include anniversaries of the Monarch’s birthday, official birthday, accession and coronation.

In the universities of the UK, red letter days are called scarlet days. On such days, doctors of the university may wear their scarlet ‘festal’ or full dress gowns instead of their undress (‘black’) gown. This is more significant for the ancient universities such as Oxford and Cambridge where academic dress is worn almost daily; the black undress gown being worn on normal occasions as opposed to the bright red gowns. Since most universities now only use academic dress on graduation day (where doctors always wear scarlet), the significance of scarlet days has all but disappeared.”

I hope like me you enjoy discovering snippets of detail that seem to be lost amongst our busy lives. Reminders of how traditions are created and how our daily routines and actions evolve using remnants of the past.

I am feeling very cheeky now! I quite like the term scarlet days it feels liberating and risque so I am going to wear red today to match my exhilarating mood – I hope you have a reason to be ‘Scarlet’ today and very much look forward to your comments.

Image: © Eric Richmond (used by kind permission)