Thanks for your thoughts!
The first one I tried suffered from trying to do "real" science, which as it turns out is really boring. (Few people contributed experiments because of the work involved in doing them "right"). Food oriented experiments seem like a more fun starting point. Blind taste testing seems like a good framework because you can try different things each year.
I'm trying to collect science demos that are fun for parties while actually being worthy of thought- here are a few examples I've found. I desperately want to find more!
I'm vegetarian, and pigs ARE particularly smart and I'm not sure whether I should in good conscience be encouraging holidays that are bacon themed in particular. I suspect that most people would eat meat on any given holiday no matter what so I'm not sure it matters.
It probably will result in slightly more people eating poorly raised pigs, all told. I decided that the benefits of a science-themed holiday, times the added popularity that it would have if I made it bacon-themed, outweighed that disutility. I understand if you disagree. (Also, I don't think that it's a bad thing to have a pig raised on a farm, have a reasonably good life, then die and be eaten. But most pigs don't live lives of high quality in our current food-system.)
I think we more or less agree about pigs. I'm fine with humanely raised and killed farm animals.
I actually encouraged Calamari at the Solstice party, and squids seem at least as intelligent as pigs. I was thinking we'd be having meat anyway so it might as well be something on theme and any single instance of meat-eating doesn't really impact overall consumption of a species. As it turned out squid is hard to cook and wasn't really worth and I'm glad, because in retrospect, if it HAD become popular, I'd feel pretty bad. The squid also ended up being eaten in ADDITION to a more traditional roast, and probably would have been in future Solstices as well, if it became popular.
The Gist: I started this blog to get people excited about a science-themed holiday. I want your suggestions before I advertise it to everyone I know!
Two years ago, I came up with the idea of celebrating Sir Francis Bacon's birthday (Jan. 22) as a festive science-themed holiday called Baconmas. (The name has the additional bonus that it's easy to convince people to come to a party if there will be bacon there.) I had a good Baconmas party in 2010 and a better one in 2011, and now I want to let other people in on the fun.
So I made a website.
It's currently "in beta"; I wrote a couple of preparatory things, but haven't yet shown it to the vast majority of my friends. I want to maximize the chance that it goes a bit viral when I do, because a science-themed holiday really needs to exist. So I'd like any suggestions you have, before I go "alpha" with it. So as to not cause anchoring, I'll put down in the first comment the things I already plan to do- if you could make all your original suggestions first, then read those plans and others' comments, then add more suggestions, that should maximize the good ideas. Thanks!
(Oh, and it goes without saying that you should celebrate Baconmas if at all possible. It's been a lot of fun for me.)