To you, it might have just seemed like a normal Thursday. But for many, Aug. 22 marked a minor holiday — Pumpkin Spice Latte Day, the first day of the year that Starbucks sells its most famous beverage.

“Happy PSL Day to my Fall Loving Family!!!” one Facebook user posted on the Leaf Rakers Society, a closed, 40,000-person strong group for the fall- and latte-obsessed.

Its popularity has helped give rise to a panoply of pumpkin spice products, including flavored Spam and scented items such as deodorant or Hefty bags, currently sold out on Amazon.

While Starbucks is often credited (or blamed) for launching the trend of pumpkin spice everything, Baltimore’s own McCormick & Company was the first to market pumpkin pie spice as we know it today in a seasoning blend released 90 years ago.

That’s right: Baltimore not only gave the world Maryland’s own favorite seasoning of Old Bay, we also gave the world pumpkin pie spice. We’re not sure whether to say “you’re welcome” or “sorry.”

But the unique flavor profile that makes up pumpkin pie spice — the combination of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice that triggers thoughts of the “fall candle” aisle at HomeGoods — actually goes back centuries, said food historian Joyce White, whose latest book, “Cooking Maryland’s Way: Voices of a Diverse Cuisine,” is out this fall.

“If you could go back in time and give somebody living here 300 years ago a pumpkin spice latte, they probably would think it [tasted] familiar,” White said. “They would not be too surprised.”

And putting pumpkin pie spice (or something like it) in savory foods? Not that weird. In fact, similar spice blends often were used in dishes like mincemeat pie as far back as the medieval era. And across the globe, many, if not most, cuisines still incorporate sweet seasonings like cinnamon into stews and meat dishes.

But it wasn’t that global history that staff at John Brown General & Butchery had in mind when they created one unique seasonal product in 2021: pumpkin spice head cheese. “We know the obsession the general public has with pumpkin spice,” said owner Robert Voss, who otherwise “hates food fads.”

In the fall, their coffee shop sells pumpkin spice lattes, made with a base incorporating pumpkin, squash and mulling spices. Those sweet flavors are a perfect match for the fatty pork they used in the head cheese, Voss said.

White traces the association of pumpkin pie seasonings and fall to the Civil War, when Thanksgiving became a national holiday and pumpkin pie became an autumnal staple across the nation.

It was just five years after McCormick first advertised its pumpkin pie spice that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up a week to boost retail sales for the Christmas season.

Holidays and capitalism, they go together like pumpkin spice and … everything.