Cinderella Day

What Is Cinderella Day?

December 31st is "Cinderella Day" in Japan. The name comes from the fairy tale, in which the magic ends at the stroke of midnight -- and no night of the year makes people watch the clock at midnight quite like New Year's Eve. No organization or founding year is on record for it; it is one of those names that simply took hold. It has become better known again in recent years as a day for countdown celebrations.

The Glass Slipper and the Midnight Deadline Are Perrault's

The Cinderella most people know today descends from "Cendrillon," published by the French writer Charles Perrault in 1697 in his collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The glass slipper, the pumpkin coach and the promise that the magic breaks at midnight are all held to be elements Perrault added. The name Cinderella Day therefore rests on one author's invention.

• 9th century: "Ye Xian," widely treated as a related tale, appears in Youyang Zazu, compiled by Duan Chengshi in Tang-dynasty China
• 1697: Charles Perrault publishes "Cendrillon," introducing the glass slipper and the midnight limit
• 1812: The Brothers Grimm include "Aschenputtel" in the first edition of their Children's and Household Tales; there is no fairy godmother in it

Versions of the Story Exist Worldwide

A stepchild mistreated at home, helped by something uncanny, and found at last through a dropped shoe -- this shape of story runs from Europe through Asia. Japan has stepchild tales of its own, such as "Nukabuku Komebuku," and the Heian-era narratives Ochikubo Monogatari and Sumiyoshi Monogatari are often grouped with them. They are not identical in structure, but the marriage that closes each one overlaps clearly.

What Became of the "Mistranslated Slipper"

A favorite piece of Cinderella trivia holds that the glass slipper was a mistranslation, and that the shoe was really squirrel fur. In French, glass is verre and squirrel fur is vair -- different spellings, near-identical pronunciation -- and the novelist Balzac, among others, argued that nobody could walk in glass and that a scribe must have misheard. But Perrault's own text reads verre, and Perrault was a member of the Académie Française, the authority on the French language. It is hard to believe he misspelled the story's defining object, and the mistranslation theory now has few defenders. The impossible material was the point.

Tips for Marking This Day

• Dress up a little for the countdown to midnight
• Arrange dinner with someone you care about and plan the toast at zero hour
• Read the Perrault and Grimm versions side by side
• Say one thing you want to do next year out loud the moment the year turns

A Night When the Magic Does Not Break

Cinderella's magic ends at twelve; New Year's midnight is a beginning rather than an end. On the night of the year when people watch the clock most closely, it is worth making the hour feel like something rather than letting it rush past.