IHOP National Pancake Day

What the day is

IHOP National Pancake Day is observed on the first Tuesday in March. It is a commercial promotion, launched by the restaurant chain IHOP in 2006, offering a free short stack in exchange for a voluntary donation to children's hospital charities. The traditional religious Pancake Day, known as Shrove Tuesday, is a separate and much older observance covered on its own entry; all three are frequently confused because they share overlapping names and, for a long time, this one shared a date with Shrove Tuesday.

Origin and background

That shared date was deliberate at first. Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent begins, is the traditional day for using up a household's eggs, milk and butter before a forty-day fast, and pancakes are the obvious way to use all three at once. IHOP's early promotions were timed to land on it, borrowing a centuries-old reason to eat pancakes for a single day's marketing push.

The dates have since come apart. Shrove Tuesday is set by Easter and can fall anywhere from early February to early March, which makes it a moving target for a national marketing campaign planned months in advance alongside advertising buys and charity logistics. IHOP has moved its own date in recent years, settling on the first Tuesday in March regardless of where Easter falls that year, which severs the promotional event from the religious calendar it originally borrowed.

The charity side is real rather than incidental. Funds raised are directed to Children's Miracle Network Hospitals and similar organizations, and the event is one of the larger single-day fundraising promotions in American casual dining, run across thousands of locations at once.

The confusion this causes is mostly harmless, but it does mean a calendar listing a single Pancake Day on a single date is almost certainly describing one of the two and silently dropping the other.

How to take part

• Check which Pancake Day a calendar means before planning around it. They rarely fall on the same day anymore.
• Make a donation even if you skip the free stack. The charity does not require the pancakes.
• Visit early. Participating locations get genuinely busy at peak hours.
• If you want the older tradition, look up this year's Shrove Tuesday date separately.