#roat beer float

National Ice Cream Day

On National Ice Cream Day, which takes place on December 13, you probably won’t hear the ice cream truck, with its delightful tune, roll through your neighborhood. (There’s another National Ice Cream Day in July for that.) Your favorite ice cream shop may even be closed for the season! But it’s still a perfectly good reason to get a pint or three (who’s counting) of the good stuff to share with your friends and family.

National Ice Cream Day timeline

500 BC

Invention of Ice Cream

People of the Persian Empire started making ice cream. by pouring concentrate of grape juice over snow.

1846

Ice Cream Maker Patented

Nancy Johnson invents and patents the first hand-cranked ice cream maker.

1978

Ben & Jerry's

Ben took a $5 course on ice-cream making and opened the first Ben & Jerry's in a converted Burlington gas station.

2001

Dairy Dream

8.9% of the milk produced in the U.S. was used to make frozen dairy products.

National Ice Cream Day Activities

Try a new flavor: There are hundreds of flavors of ice cream beyond just chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. If you’re feeling zesty, find a parlor that offers lemon meringue, or even horseradish ice cream. Or, if seafood is more your thing, find one of the joints on the east coast that serve up lobster ice cream. If you don’t like it, at least you can say you tried.

Go old school: Before the commercial success of ice cream in America in the 1800s, ice cream was typically reserved as a special summertime treat. But now, thanks to simple and cheap at-home devices, you can make whatever flavor you want. All you need is eggs, milk, cream, sugar, and the flavorings of your choice. It may take longer than a quick trip to the grocery store, but it’s a fun way to enjoy this cold confection.

Volunteer in your community: Serving ice cream is a tried and true way to bring a community together. This may be at the ice cream parlor in a local assisted living center, or perhaps at a free ice cream giveaway at the park, funded by donations. However you do it, the community will be brought closer together by this longtime summer food favorite.

Why We Love National Ice Cream Day

It makes us happy: Now this may seem a bit too obvious, but ice cream makes us happy. If you need proof, just ask some of the neuroscientists over at the University of Sussex in England. In one study, the scientists found that vanilla ice cream activates a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. In simpler terms, when we eat ice cream, the pleasure center of our brain lights up. This is great news. Thanks science.

It’s social: Whether we’re scrambling down the street chasing the ice cream truck or meeting up with friends at the local dairy, ice cream is more than just a cool treat — it’s a social outing. You can’t beat a shared banana split. Need a place where three generations of a family can all find something they want? An ice cream parlor’s the place to be.

There are endless varieties: Almost as soon as ice cream was sold in America, people started adding new flavors and experimenting with the creation process. Now, more than 200 years later, it’s hard to imagine a flavor of ice cream that’s yet to be invented. Bacon, garlic, wasabi, and fish egg ice cream flavors are all out there at the moment, just to name a few.

National Snack Day

Today is dedicated to eating snacks! Snacks are usually smaller than a meal and often eaten between them. They are sometimes even eaten late at night and called midnight snacks. They can be bought processed or prepackaged, or made fresh at home. They may be unhealthy or healthy. The word “snack” derives from the Dutch word “snacken,” which means to bite. By 1402, the word had appeared in English as a noun.

The first snack food in the United States was the peanut. Peanuts first arrived from South America via slave ships and began being used in cooking in southern plantations. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that their popularity spread north, and they eventually became popular at baseball games and in vaudeville theaters. Snacks such as popcorn, pretzels, and peanuts were seen as being lower-class foods, and were sold from street vendors during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Many snack foods were sold or introduced at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, leading to their popularity across the country. Examples include cotton candy, hot dogs, waffle cones, and hamburgers. Jell-O was also invented around the turn of century, and the 1910s brought us the Oreo cookie and individually-wrapped chocolate Tastycakes.

Snacking gained popularity during the Prohibition era. At this time, pretzels became more accepted. The era of Prohibition and the Great Depression brought us the Butterfinger, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Twinkies, Snickers, Fritos, Ritz Crackers, and Lay’s Potato Chips. Improved packaging made snack foods more popular—they had less of a contamination risk and could more easily be advertised with their visible logos.

During World War II, rationing of foodstuffs such as meat, butter, and sugar was part of the war effort, so not many new snacks were introduced. An exception was M&M’s, which began being produced in 1941 for soldiers overseas. Cheetos are an example of a snack that was introduced shortly after the end of the war. By the 1950s, snacking had become an American pastime. The rest of the century brought us many new snacks: Pop-Tarts, Pringles, Doritos, Hunt’s Snack Pack pudding, Gatorade, Combos, Reese’s Pieces, Fruit Roll-Ups, and Teddy Grahams.

Today, Americans buy 4.3 billion pounds of snack food a year, eating seventeen pounds a person. The most popular snack food in America is the potato chip, which Americans gobble over six pounds a person of each year. The other top snack foods include nuts, microwave popcorn, and corn chips. Today’s holiday was created by Jace Shoemaker-Galloway, the “Queen of Holidays.”

How to Observe National Snack Day

Celebrate the day by eating snacks. It’s not even necessary to eat any meals today; replace them with snacks and try as many as you can. Here are a few common snacks to get you started:

Popular Snacks:

Chips

Cookies

Ice cream

Popsicles

Pretzels

Crackers

Snack mix (such as Chex Mix or Gardetto’s)

Candy

Healthier Snacks:

Fruits and vegetables (may be dipped in healthy dips such as hummus and yogurt)

Nuts and seeds

Whole grain cereals, oats, and granola bars with few added sweeteners

Low-fat yogurt and cheeses

Popcorn without a large amount of salt or fat added