Day of Happy Regrets
The Day of Happy Regrets (15 February) is an unofficial festivity observed in the Grand Duchy of Isselmere and the Principality of Anguist commemorates the death of the first king of the Isselmerians and Anguistians, Forthar I the Brute, following a night of debauchery with his queen, Maldren of Apphelia, and Ilse the Unready of Nieland, the wife of his deceased son, Gorm the Crude. He is said to have died with a smile on his face.
Early celebrants of both sexes witnessed the day by telling ribald tales in pubs and engaging in private competition of increasingly lurid pranks on one another. Public drunkenness and orgiastic behaviour was evident in both towns and countryside. The sexual licence that initially marked the event decreased — but did not cease — with the spread of syphilis in the sixteenth-century. These celebrations were also contained somewhat by occurring in the midst of the dearth period that affected the lower orders until the agricultural revolution that emerged in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries.
The Reformation tamed the worst excesses in the cities, although it has been remarked by some historians that the repressed enthusiasm merely led to its expression elsewhere.
In contemporary Isselmere-Nieland, the Day of Happy Regrets is one of the few instances in which public drunkenness is somewhat acceptable. What goes on in the inhabitants' homes is a matter best left to consenting adults.
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