This Saturday is World Cancer Day.
The next day it's British Yorkshire Pudding Day. It's a busy weekend.
Which one will you be marking, taking time out with quiet reflection and thinking of friends, or striking out to campaign for a batter, sorry, better future?
There are now more awareness days than there are just days. Then you add in the awareness weeks, fortnights and months and it's sometimes hard to remember what you should be remembering.
Some of these awareness days will mean a great deal to many people and are fundamentally valuable, but many are guilty of being just awkward PR vehicles or simply ridiculous creations - National Talk Like A Pirate Day? Oh OK, I quite like that one... but where did they all come from and what can or should they do to make us 'aware' and become effective channels for change?
Every November, I proudly take a few minutes of reflection to mark Armistice Day. The 11th day of the 11th month was recorded as effectively the end of the First World War, an opportunity to remember the fallen. The day has evolved as we have and today helps us to collectively consider all those who are affected by conflict and it helps us to frame our own lives and relationships.
It is from such collective compassion that these awareness days have evolved - and now they are everywhere. With so much competition, being an awareness day on its own will not secure media coverage and bring the important issues to the public's attention that they once could. Messages will not get though unless delivered creatively and with social action (and indeed social media) at its heart.
An effective example is Holocaust Memorial Day, marked last week and every 27th January. The date was chosen as this was the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and it has now found new ground (since 2001 in the UK) in this annual opportunity to remember, learn, share and educate on the Holocaust and all genocides.
This year had a new theme: 'Speak Up, Speak Out', encouraging people to take inspiration from the past to challenge the language of hatred and change the future. Visitors to the website can sign the pledge, order campaign packs, get involved. And they have. And with the good work of the organisers of this awareness day, many more people will listen and act in future on the day itself and during the activities that continue throughout the year.
For awareness days to mean something, to justify their existence, they need to achieve something that affects social or environmental change or helps us to lead healthier, happier lives.
For Saturday's World Cancer Day, we are also asked to make a pledge and hundreds of thousands of people have done precisely this - a vast number of people who promise to do something to make things better, using the online toolkits or attending the global events mapped on the website, which rightly announces 'together it is possible'.
One of the most remarkable of the awareness days is one that would probably object to me even including it in this category but the fact it doesn't neatly fit into classification demonstrates its effectiveness - Peace One Day, a global campaign to bring about peace around the world for one whole day (21st September) each year. If it can achieve that, the founder says modestly, it can achieve a great deal more. It works through tireless campaigning, political petitioning, fundraising, a world-wide series of rock concerts, a global pledge, a grass roots education programme and it works because it is a simple message, neatly conceived, communicated effectively and, indeed, it works - during cease-fires acted out on Peace One Day last year, 50,000 Afghans in inaccessible regions were immunised against vaccine-preventable diseases, and a nationwide polio campaign targeting 8 million children was launched there. At last year's London concert I keenly watched as #peaceoneday trended on twitter and spread around the world.
It is remarkable what could be achieved if each day that is committed to bringing about change was able to realise its ambition. But to do that, these days need to stand out.
So please, o assorted awareness days, justify yourselves as these examples have. Use the day to motivate the masses to join you and do something truly amazing and surprising. Do something different, and help us to do something different. Don't just sit there on the calendar looking like a prize (Yorkshire) pudding.