On the third Saturday in the month of October many larger cities in the Great Lakes region, such as Detroit and Buffalo, celebrate a holiday called Sweetest Day. Sweetest Day in October has never been officially recognized by any government as an official holiday but Sweetest Day in October is extremely popular in cities like Buffalo, Detroit, and the city where it is rumored to have started Cleveland, Ohio. He rumor has it that a conference of candy makers in the Cleveland area got together some time in the early 1800’s and decided that they wanted to create a day that would be remembered as a day for eating candy and so Sweetest Day in October was born. The meeting was said to have been chaired by the famed Cleveland candy maker CC Hartzell and to get their new holiday started the candy makers of Cleveland distributed boxes of candy to newspaper boys, mail carriers, orphans, the elderly, and poor children as a show of hospitality on the holiday they created. It caught on in some areas but not in others.

Sweetest Day in October began to gain some momentum in the Northeast especially along the Great Lakes Region where the larger cities like Detroit, Michigan and Buffalo, New York had their fair share of candy makers that all thought this new holiday of Sweetest Day in October was a great idea and they did their part to try and push the holiday along. But try as they might they just could not get people outside of the rust belt to accept the new holiday. In 1940 the National Confectioners Association launched a campaign to make Sweetest Day on October 19 and distributed candy to poor children throughout the area to try and get the rest of the population to catch on to this new Sweetest Day in October. The National Confectioners Association felt that if they showed good will towards poor children that their Sweetest Day in October holiday would catch on and be thought of as Mother’s Day but it never came to be.

Today Sweetest Day does not appear on many calendars throughout the country but in the Northeast you start to see Sweetest Day in October reminders as the day draws closer. Sweetest Day in October originally started as a holiday created completely by candy makers just to get people to buy more candy but soon some people in the Northeast started to mistake the name Sweetest Day to mean a remembrance of your significant other not unlike Valentine’s Day. That is the way Sweetest Day finally caught on in the Northeast as today there are Sweetest Day cards, flowers, and candy sent to your dearly beloved and it is treated much like Valentine’s Day in February. It is not what the National Confectioners Association wanted to happen but as long as it sells candy in the middle of October then they will probably not be complaining too much. Most people outside of the Northeast have no idea what Sweetest Day is and not many people celebrate it. The day just never caught on as many people feel that the candy industry has enough holidays for people to buy candy on and a fabricated holiday just to sell candy is over the top for many people.