The ones that move, and why people get them wrong
- Mother’s Day is not in May in the UK.
- Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday of Lent, so it lands in March and moves with Easter. Every year somebody schedules against the American date and misses it by ten weeks.
- Easter moves by more than a month.
- It can fall anywhere from late March to late April, which drags Pancake Day and Mothering Sunday along with it.
- Black Friday is not a date.
- It is the Friday after American Thanksgiving, so it shifts by a week between years and the run-up shifts with it.
- Small Business Saturday is the first Saturday of December.
- That is not the same weekend two years running, and it is the one national day built specifically for independents.
How to use the run-up
The start-by date is when the work begins, not when the posting begins. For Christmas that means October, because the decisions people make about where to book their December are largely made in November, and a business that starts advertising in the first week of December is advertising to people whose plans are made.