Burrito Day is a Connamara tradition dating back to 2008 that is so important to our culture that Connamarians have created an official Burrito Day site.
The following is cross-posted from there, as researched by Director of Engineering and 15-year Connamara veteran Grant Birchmeier.
History
The first Burrito Day was likely Dec 29, 30, or 31, 2008, and not formally recorded until after the fact. We were still in the original 13th-floor big-shared-room cave office, and there was one day between the two holidays when three different groups of guys came back from lunch runs with burritos from different restaurants (probably Burrito Buggy [rip], Chipotle, and La Bamba). I jokingly put it on the calendar as Burrito Day to commemorate this dumb coincidence.
The second Burrito Day was some day before or after Jan 2, 2010, but probably not Jan 2. In early Dec 2009, Mike Gatny (surely inspired by the 2008 calendar entry) created a calendar invite for an annual Burrito Day (“Annually on January 2 except Fri Jan 2”) with a bunch of arcane rules as to whether Chris Busbey or Kirk Kozel would have to pay for it (followed by an email chain of haggling over details, all of which was nonsense). Ironically, the invite doesn’t clearly state what day it shall be observed for that year! Whatever day it was, Jim Downs, aka “jcd”, Connamara founder, bought the burritos.
Mike Gatny says: “My main memory of Burrito Day sticking was that jcd [Jim Downs, CEO] noticed we were eating burritos, and he wanted one too, and that turned into him buying, which we were all down for.”
The calendar account that had the original Burrito Day entries no longer exists (I think it was “Connamara General,” which was linked to an old system we stopped using long ago), but I’m sure the above is mostly correct and accurate.
Since 2011 and beyond, Burrito Day has been one of the first working days of the new year. I don’t know why Jim started buying us burritos and continues to do so, but we all appreciate it.
COVID Crisis: I think Burrito Day was skipped in 2021 (our first work-from-home New Year’s Day), but we distributed Doordash credits to do remote Burrito Day in 2022 and again in 2023.
I keep thinking Burrito Day is going to fade away, but then every year, someone unexpectedly announces that we’re buying burritos, and it continues. More than once, I have shoved a planned non-burrito lunch in the fridge to enjoy the unexpected festivity.
