National Cousins Day Date in the current year: July 24, 2024

In the most basic sense, a cousin is any relative by marriage or by blood, especially one who is more distant than a sibling but shares an ancestor with you. Measures such as degrees and removals are used to describe cousin relationships within an extended family. Degree indicates the common ancestor; for example, first cousins share a grandparent, while second cousins share a great-grandparent. Removal indicates the number of generations that separate the cousins; for instance, your cousin once removed is either your parent’s cousin or your cousin’s child.

In the narrow sense, the term cousin is applied to first cousins with no removals, i.e. the children of your parents’ siblings. In large, close-knit extended families that spend a great deal of time together cousins are each other’s first close friends. In fact, cousins in the same age bracket may become closer than siblings further apart in age. They hang out together at family functions and sometimes even go to the same school, protect each other, trust each other, become each other’s confidants, and love each other unconditionally. Of course, not all families have such dynamics between cousins, but those that do are very lucky.

The origins of National Cousins Day are unclear, but it definitely deserve its place among other family-related holidays such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparents Day, Siblings Day, and many others. The best way to celebrate the holiday is, of course, reaching out to your cousins to remind them that you love them.

If you live close to each other, go out for brunch, lunch or dinner, or even spend the whole day together reminiscing about the good old days and laughing at inside jokes no one else with ever understand. Don’t forget to take a group photo and share it on social media with the hashtags #NationalCousinsDay and #CousinsDay.

If some of your cousins live too far away, give them a call or at least send them a text to let them know you are thinking about them and miss them. You can even organize an online reunion via Zoom for all or most of your cousins. It may require some schedule juggling, especially if there are multiple time zones involved, but the result will be worth it.

Sometimes out relationships with cousins are strained. National Cousins Day may be a good occasion to extend an olive branch. You don’t have to be best friends with all your cousins, especially if you weren’t particularly close growing up, but being civil with each other at family functions won’t hurt.

One more way to celebrate National Cousins Day is to take a DNA test to see whether you have distant cousins you know nothing about. Of course, genetic ancestry testing has its risks; there is no guarantee that you’ll like what you learn or that your newly discovered cousins will want something to do with you. But hey, you will never know till your try.