It's National Doughnut Week

National Doughnut Week is a very special week where businesses including bakers, coffee shops, and offices take part and sell lots of delicious doughnuts to raise funds for The Children’s Trust.

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So if you are wondering what to treat yourself with on the first day of a long weekend, go get yourself a doughnut and you're basically doing charity work!

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To get in the spirit of things, here are a bunch of facts about the most hole-y of snacks, but be careful because not all of them are true (disclaimer, I used ChatGPT for this so there's a chance absolutely none of them are true)

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• In 1847, a 16-year-old sea captain named Hanson Gregory is said to have punched the hole in the center of a traditional doughnut, creating today’s familiar ring shape.​

• The word “doughnut” first appeared in print (as “dough-nuts”) in an American cookbook in 1809.

• In 1920, Russian immigrant Adolph Levitt patented the first automated doughnut-making machine, revolutionizing mass production at New York City’s Lafayette Street Bakery.

• National Doughnut Day was inaugurated in 1938 by the Salvation Army in Chicago to raise funds for social-service programs during the Great Depression.

• The world’s priciest doughnut debuted in 2012: a $1,000 creation encrusted with edible gold leaf and Tahitian vanilla bean glaze.

• Americans consume roughly 10 billion doughnuts every year—enough to circle the Earth nearly four times if placed end to end.

• In Germany (and parts of Austria), the jam-filled doughnut known as a “Berliner” is traditionally eaten on New Year’s Eve for good luck.

• In 1995, NASA developed a zero-gravity doughnut baker for Space Shuttle missions so astronauts could enjoy fresh pastries in orbit.

• During medieval France, ring-shaped fried dough was occasionally used by court minstrels as a makeshift percussion instrument.

• The smallest doughnut ever “baked” measures just 0.5 mm across and was created by nanotechnology researchers as a novelty.