This Day in Oops! — November 28

Unknown year: Drunken Hedgehog Day is celebrated for the first time

Good time of day, humans!

Today, we’re looking into the history of unusual feasts.

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If you’re on the internet, you might have heard that:

On November 28th, an unusual holiday is celebrated: Drunken Hedgehog Day. This holiday was invented in medieval Hungary. Hedgehogs were given beer to make them braver and to protect the harvest from mice and rats¹.

Some sites give you a little more background:

Hedgehogs proved to be huge alcohol lovers, particularly they preferred beer and mulled wine. Under the hangover influence, hedgehogs became fearless and merciless towards the parasites habitating their environment. They walked around the territory, snuffled and puffed, attracting mice and snakes. After that, hedgehogs pounced on their victims and bit their throats to death².

You can even buy t-shirts dedicated to this occasion

This sounds suspicious. How could a hedgehog, sober or not, ever catch a rat that’s capable of running several times as fast?

There’s a bigger problem. In Hungary, where this feast supposedly originated, few if any humans have ever heard of it.

It appears the the whole story started circulating in the Russian segment of the internet in early 2000s as a part of «holidays today» lists, also known as «excuses to have a drink».

But where did they get the idea? Well, the story starts in 1905, when Russian biologist and amateur musician Leonid Beckman composed a simple Christmas song A Spruce Was Born in the Forest³.

After 1917, Soviets initially banned Christmas celebrations altogether, but later more secular elements were brought back as a part New Year celebrations. Among those was this song that contains no religious themes whatsoever.

The simple tune gave rise to multiple schoolboy parodies, most of them quite tasteless as schoolboy folklore goes. Of particular interest to us is this variant that was already known in 1970s and can be found on TikTok to this day:

В лесу родилась ёлочка,
А кто её родил?
Четыре пьяных ёжика
И Гена крокодил.

In forest a spruce was born,
But who gave birth to it?
Four drunken hedgehogs
And Gena the crocodile.

It was probably never meant to make any sense, and hedgehogs were chosen simply because of alliteration (yolochka - yozhika).

Additional impulse to the drunken hedgehog lore was provided in 1997 by Russian punkrock/disco band Krasnaya Plesen who released a song Drunken Hedgehog. The song itself was nothing special, just a rip-off of One Way Ticket by Eruption with some profanity added but it repeated the words «drunken, drunken hedgehog» a couple dozen times.

By 2000, almost everyone «knew» hedgehogs can get drunk but no one had any idea how and why. The news that changed this came in 2001 from Great Britain:

Britain's wild hedgehogs are getting tipsy by availing themselves of tubs of beer that gardeners leave out overnight to trap slugs.

Kay Bullen, a trustee of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, told AFP her members are concerned because the creatures have been found to get so drunk that they fall asleep, forgetting to roll up into a protective ball.

They are attracted to the liquor by its sweet smell as they make their nocturnal visits to gardens.

"We have seen a number of inebriated hedgehogs and some with rather bad hangovers," Ann Jenkins, another member of the society, told the Daily Express newspaper⁴.

The story was reported on a number of Russian blogs and websites, and soon thereafter, first mentions of the Drunken Hedgehog Day appeared.

Why it got attributed to Hungary is somewhat of a mystery. Hungarians however don’t seem to be offended and are more than happy to add to the confusion:

No, this is actually a new holiday here, created by the Orbán government⁵.

To sum it up: Drunk Hedgehog Day isn’t real… yet. But if you need an excuse to have a drink, you can as well make it real.

1. The Unusual Celebration of Drunken Hedgehog Day, December 3, 2023

2. Why Should You Befriend a Drunk Heghehog?, March 25, 2018

3. A Spruce Was Born in the Forest (Wikipedia)

4. Wild hedgehogs get tipsy, May 17, 2001

5. Drunk hedgehog's day in Hungary, reddit.com/r/hungary, around 2019