Name day
One of the stupidest traditions in spain (and there are no few to choose from) is to celebrate someone's “name day”. That is, a day of the year that is tied to a name by the arbitrary decision of some religious guys.
It plays the role of a birthday, which in its way it may be a bit silly, but at least it has the nice properties of being personal (in the sense that it marks something specific that actually happened to you) and universal (in the sense that everybody has one, independently of their name or religion).
In any case, one day of the year that has a particular excuse for making people remember you and throwing a party sounds like a good thing to me. But making such day a “name day”? So, what if your name is not any of the standard ones that have a day assigned to them? All your friends would have one and you don't, that's pretty crappy. Plus, what is your actual relationship with the saint whose name you are celebrating? Absolutely none.
When I was a kid we would celebrate both birthdays and name days. To be fair, name days are in the decline and have been for a long time in spain, but I find people reminding me of name days annoyingly often. And thus my entry of today.
I don't care. I couldn't care less for such a religious and arbitrary impersonal day. Since I was a kid I found them distasteful, and time has only strengthened such opinion. Name days are, at best, ridiculous.
So I don't plan to celebrate them in any way, obviously. Whenever I get greetings for my name day, fortune had it that it's also the “day of the book”, so I can happily accept the good wishes for the books and wish back a good day of the book to everyone.
Happy reading!