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Today is Great Prayer Day in Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Store Bededag, also known as Great Prayer Day or General Prayer Day, is a special Danish festival celebrated on the fourth Friday after Easter Sunday. People in Denmark will no longer get a public holiday for “Great Prayer Day” from 2024 after lawmakers passed a bill on scrapping it as a public holiday.

Unusually for a holiday, the source for Great Prayer can be traced to one man, Hans Bagger, who was a bishop in Roskilde in the late seventeenth century. Bagger had introduced some new praying and fasting days, but given the number of holy days in the calendar already, it became clear that all the days of praying and fasting were having an impact on daily life, so it was decided that several of the lesser holy days should be combined into one of Bagger’s days, which became Great Prayer Day.

The Great Prayer Day was put on the Statute book by King Christian V in 1686.

Under the law, all trade, work, etc were forbidden from 6pm on the day before Great Prayer Day, to ensure that nobody would be late or drunk when they had to attend the next day’s obligatory church service.

The bakers came up with the idea of baking some extra ‘hvede’ – cardamom-infused wheat buns with a generous spreading of butter on the Thursday which could then be heated up and eaten the following day. It gradually became common throughout the country to eat the hot buns, but nowadays on the evening before Great Prayer Day.

Today is the birthday, in 1942, of American soul singer and actress Barbara Randolph who recorded for Motown Records in the 1960s. In 1964, she joined The Platters. She died on 15 July 2002 age 60. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEzfhclKO8Q