Monday, September 25, is National Lobster Day, a official food holiday on which you can (and should) traipse along the seashore double-fisting whole lobsters. June 15, by the way, is also National Lobster Day. Nope, you’re not experiencing double vision as you Google. There are indeed two wholly distinct National Lobster Days every year, and the reason says a bit about how these “celebrations” come to exist in the first place.
Why National Lobster Day falls on two different days
The original National Lobster Day is the one celebrated on June 15, and like many national food holidays of its ilk, it’s not entirely clear how, when, or why it was established on that date. Some mysteries live on forever. The September 25 National Lobster Day, however, has a much more definitive origin story.
As explained by Lobster Anywhere, a mail order seafood company based in New England, September 25 is situated at the height of lobster harvesting season. In 2015, the Maine Lobster Dealers’ Association, an organization dedicated to helping solve challenges faced by those in the lobster industry, asked for the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative to help them change National Lobster Day from the June to the September date.
There’s a strategic reason to shift the holiday to later in the year. In June, as summer weather descends and people enter vacation mode, the seafood industry has no problem selling lobster—virtually everyone is already paying to enjoy a lobster roll in the sunshine up and down the coast. June 15, then, isn’t a date on which lobstermen need any help moving product. Although September is smack-dab in the middle of harvesting season, fewer people are thinking about purchasing and eating lobster during that time, so using the holiday as a sort of awareness campaign can have a large economic impact.
Later in 2015, a resolution was proposed by Maine senators Angus King and Susan Collins to establish September 25 as the official National Lobster Day. In 2020—these things move slowly—the Senate finally made it official.
But even though a new date was declared for this “holiday,” it’s not like you can exactly abolish the existing one; there’s no formal process to strip a date of its designation. So June 15 has remained as sort of a vestigial holiday that’s still used as a secondary promotional tool when it comes around every year.
The important thing to know is that in order to drum up interest in the holiday, September 25 is a date full of deals and discounts on lobster, and you should take advantage wherever you can, at both restaurants and via direct-to-consumer purveyors. Lobster can be expensive, so it helps to snag deals where you can find them.
If you don’t live on the East Coast and you’re looking for some lobster, you can browse the list of Maine Lobster suppliers that ship nationwide here. And if you decide to assemble some homemade lobster rolls, consider making them Connecticut-style.