About National Sweetest Day
A lot of people assume Sweetest Day, the third Saturday in October, was created by greeting card companies.
But Hallmark said it was invented by Herbert Birch Kingston, an employee at a Cleveland candy company around 1922.
He gave candy and small gifts to orphans and shut-ins to show them that they were not forgotten, Hallmark spokesman Rachel Bolton said.
The companies distributed over 20,000 boxes of candy to orphans, old folks, and the poor, according to Hallmark.
In the 1930s, Hallmark said movie stars got in on the celebration, with stars giving out thousands of pieces of candy to newsboys, theatergoers, and hospital patients.
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