The thread for weird regional holidays

Or: fuck you Elyscape, you can't tell me what to do! You're not my real dad anyway!

This thread is for discussion on weird holidays your country celibrates, so we can talk about how weird they are. The start of this discussion can be found here (after all the body size talk), but I thought it could use a thread of its own (and it's more suited for January anyway). Summoning Davian Korran, Sofalisa, Ivi, MariPanda and Jaakusan. And everybody who was interested of course.

So today a national holiday in The Netherlands started, called Carnaval. Or Vastelaovond for people in the south. It's mostely celibrated by people in the south and middle of the country. Vastelaovond means 'the night before fasting' and Carnaval comes from the Latin expression carne vale, meaning 'farewell to meat', because it's the last change to feast on meat before fasting.
The modern interpretation of this holiday is that people get dressed up (like Halloween) and then proceed to get shitfaced (like Halloween). Except it lasts for about a week. Also, there are parades that look like this:

With it come high doses of terrible music and lame jokes/puns. We also have a designated Prins Carnaval, a Master of Ceremony. I'm not sure what he does exactly to be honest, although he gets his own float in the parade.

I can't really find the origin of the dressing up (will be looking into that later) but I'm assuming it comes from the same thing as Halloween: for chasing away evil spirits. It's one version of many midwinter fests that are celibrated around Europe, going as far as Russia (according to Wikipedia).

Now Davian Korran and Ivi have already mentioned that they also have versions of this, Fastelavn in Denmark and Uzgavenes in Lithuania, though I'll let them explain how their respective countries celebrate. I was wondering if there are other Europeans who have a version of this holiday? Or maybe your country has a weird holiday that you're dying to talk about. Discuss!

In Denmark, children dress up in costumes and beat a barrel to pieces with a baseball bat. In the barrel is candy. Used to be it was a live cat you were supposed to frighten to death to chase away evil spirits.

Also, we eat these.



There's a bit more to it like dressed up a tree branch and waking your parents with it singing about how your name is Fastelavn and you want buns, but that's the main gist of it. If you want weird, look no further than another February event, the Kyndelmisse.

Daaaaaaamn, those look delicious. Unfortunately, we don't have any special foods for Carnaval, although, they through candy into the crowd from the floats in the parade

I learned from my childhood's television (we had one Danish channel and 3 German and NOTHING ELSE) that Germans celebrate this holiday by wearing weird hats and singing awful awful songs.

For us it's like Halloween, but in daytime and without the focus on monsters. So kids go around dressed up begging for money - it used to be home baked cakes, then sweets and now they hope for money.

We eat this:


And we dress our kids like this:


And then we beat a cat to death:


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Edit: David beat me to it. I had no idea you were Danish.

Pssst. It's Davian.

This Carnaval of yours, Lizzy, reminds me a lot brazilian Carnaval. Some people like to use costumes too (mainly kids) and we have parades, but with more barely dressed women than your parades.
There's a lot of terrible music that makes me feel ashamed of my country, a lot of drunk people and a lot of guys grabbing your butt when you walk past them. And a lot of inconsequent sex too, even with the huge condom advertisements amount.
I hate this holiday, but it's kinda fun when I spend it with my beloved cousins, so we can get drunk, do stupid shit and laugh at it later.

I dunno, I always thought Brazilian Carnaval looked more fun than Dutch Carnaval, but maybe it's not so different after all. Here it's really bourgeoise, a lot of middleclass white people do boring stuff. The parades are the worst IMO, I used to stand in the cold for hours and all the floats were ugly and based on really dumb jokes. I love terrible puns but they are so bad I don't even like them. And if you want a little taste of the terrible music:

It's... yeah... no...

I'm on my phone now, so I'll listen when I get home and give ypu samples of the music here too

I think the main difference between our Carnavais is that here we have more almost naked women dancing samba and poor people.
In the city I usually spend my Carnaval, there's always a drag queen parade, and it's the very best one, and also hilarious.

Here it's basically a children's holiday. It's meant to chase away winter so that spring may finally come. Winter is female, so you burn a woman doll, sometimes called 'More' on top of a huge bonfire and then dance around it. You yell for winter to get out and play games, sing traditional songs and so on. Unlike everyone else's holidays, ours seems to never have been modernized - for example, you can only dress in traditional costumes like witch, goat, devil, hobo, gypsy, crane and similar stuff. So no spiderman costumes, unfortunately :p

Once More has finished burning, children can go trick or treating for pancakes. There's even a special chant you're supposed to say, it goes like this:
'We're the gypsies of Lithuania,
We ask for pancakes and coffee,
If the dough hasn't been mixed,
Please start scraping for money'

Except it rhymes and stuff. You don't get the day off or anything, so it's not common to see people drunk on this day. You're supposed to basically eat pancakes for every meal on this day though - most people give their children pancakes to bring to school.

Melbourne Cup Day.

For one day in November, the whole of white collar middle managed Australia gets catered lunch and beer / champagne so we can watch a horse race on the TV in the office.

It's an actual Public Holiday in one state.

We have something like this in Germany, too. The catholic places, anyway.
Depending on were you are it's either called "Karneval" in the Cologne/ Düsseldorf area or "Fastnacht" (meaning "Night before Lent") in the south-west and Switzerland. I'm terrible at explaining things, so I will link you guys to the English Wikiarticle for Fastnacht, because that's what I celebrate.

I shall also share some pictures from last year:

I don't think Carnaval even have a meaning here. It's just plain brute fun for as far as I know.
I mean, it's obviously not a religious thing, and we don't have any rituals and I don't think we're celebrating anything that happened in the past.
Maybe it's just something to distract people from how shitty and corrupt everything here is.
Besides from this, I don't think we have any srange holidays. Some of them are just excuses to not going to work, 'cause even when it has a reason for it to exist, there's no festiival or celebrations for them.

When did that start? How did it come to be in the first place? So many questions...

Oh yeah, that's what I forgot to mention: the reason it's not celibrated in the North-West is that those areas are mostely protestant (Calvinism) and the South-East is catholic. I should say that religion hardly plays any part in it anymore thouhg, most people don't really know what Carnaval is all about.

I love how they're just pushing a stroller. This mask is amazing, it's a shame the people here don't dress up like that.

It stems from the catholic Lent thing I guess (isn't Brazil a pretty catholic country?), but like here people just sort of forgot the real reason and started partying. Hard.

You have Thanksgiving! Which is national but not really celibrated by any other countries. Except Canada right? Is Canadian Thanksgiving a thing?

I still don't really understand what thanksgiving is. Did the pilgrims share a turkey dinner with the native americans or something?

Man, our version seems so lame in comparison to yours, you hardly ever see masks and costumes of such quality...
In other news, the Kaziukas fair is coming up soon, it's sometime in March I think? It's always neat, but if it's ridiculously cold again I'm not going :T

Only organised groups wear masks like that, they are often modelled after local legendary figures.They are super expensive to make, and very few people create them to begin with.

I was thinking about weird holidays, and I can't help but be curious... On the three kings' day, do people in your country mark other people's doors with the first letters of each of the kings' names? It's really weird, and I still don't get why it's done here...

We do!
It's actually not the first letters of the kings' names, that one is just coincidence. It's the abbreviation of the blessing Christus mansionem benedicat ("May Christ bless this house")

We don't. It's tradition to make a great big bonfire of the Christmas trees, but I think it's not really done anymore (lots of safety/environmental issues).

Oh! I've been told you're just supposed to keep the tree until that day and then throw it out :o
I don't really know how else it's celebrated, although this year I saw a mini-parade with people in the front dressed as the three kings, but wearing ridiculously huge heads.

Historical observances of Thanksgiving go as far back as Spanish occupation of North America, but it was Lincoln during the Civil War that established it as a "national day of giving thanks."

At first it was somewhat similar to our Memorial Day holiday, but over time morphed into the big-dinner pilgrim folklore day. It also serves as the official start to the Christmas season, as the day after Thanksgiving is one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

Virginia actually has the somewhat embarrassing Lee-Jackson Day, but it was more or less merged into MLK day, so it's not much of a thing anymore.

Foreign holidays are weird.

And on that note.

Here in Sweden we make giant bonfires on the last of April.



It's some old pagan thing that got co-opted into a festival for a saint and then who knows. But we light a lot of big fires.

Most people here are catholic, yes, but Carnaval is not catholic at all. It's much too not-virtuous to have anything to do with the Church.
I tried and looked at it in the internet but couldn't find anything about Carnaval here in Brazil and it's meaning at all. I found about it's meaning in old Egypt and Greece, and that the Church tried to make it into a holiday where you pay penitence for your sins or something (and it looks like they failed completely at this =P) But it didn't say what is it's actual meaning here in Brazil these days.

Also, I think your Carnaval music funnier than mine. I have three samples here:

The kind of music they play during parades (don't need to watch the entire thing):

On a live parade, even the small ones like the ones I go to, the drums are too loud, you can't hear anyone even if they scream at your ears.

Classic Carnaval music. It's the kind of old music that is played sometimes during the day, when they set up things for kids to play with:

Their lyrics are kinda funny.

The kind of music that plays in the actual "grown-ups" parties. It's not Carnaval exclusive:

And this ones are what makes me ashamed of my country.

Carnival (and Mardi Gras, etc) celebrations have everything to do with getting all the sinful stuff out of one's system before Lent (the period where you deny yourself everything) begins. The Lating meaning of the word Carnival means to "remove meat," which is what traditionally people did during Lent.

A lot of its roots also are related to Saturnalia, which was a pagan festival conveniently located adjacent to it, much in the way that Yule/Midwinter was conveniently adjacent to Christmas.

I think not! One of those in that mix was called 'Kontebonke'. It's not as crude as 'assfucking', but that's what it translates into. I think we can agree that it's both pretty terrible.

I did say most of this in the first post, with exception from Saturnalia (although in the predecessor of this thread I mentioned it's based on several pagan festivals which includes Saturnalia).

I think it was brought over by colonists and after a long period of mixing cultures you get the current Carnaval in Brazil. Like I said, it doesn't really have any religious meaning anymore, at least not for most people. I hardly know any catholics who fast during Lent so that's also a factor in the thinning of the religious meaning.

According to what I searched, Carnaval was first meant to be a fertility festival in Greece. Then Catholic church changed it.
The idea of the changing was for Carnaval to be a holiday where people don't commit sins in any way, if I got that right. But they failed. Here in Brazil, a lot of "sinful" things happen during Carnaval and everybody knows that.
But I don't really know, because every site I look tells the story a little bit different. Anyway, the meaning of Carnaval for us doesn't seems to be important, we just go out and party and that's it...

But I just remembered another holiday, Festa Junina (June festival), in which people do countryside-like parties during all the month. It's one of the best, 'cause the food is delicious.

Also, how the quadrilha song is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q45AKyWxuY8

Yeah, this is how Swedes celebrate Christmas:



We do the bonfire thing on the 23rd of June on my holiday (Saint Hans' Day).

It's important to note that both ancient Greece and Rome had a lot of these sorts of festivals. So did different pagan tribes in the rest of Europe. It's very hard to pin down the exact one, and there are different theories. Times like this were excellent for it, because winter is coming to an end and they would need to start offering to the gods for a pleasing outcome in next harvestseason.
And it also took centuries before the Catholic church had the power to change it at their will. Actually the take-over shows us that the Church had limited power, since the newly converted parts of Europe refused to stop with these sort of festivities. The development of this is not so clean-cut as it might appear. Yes even the presentday holidays have their roots in these festivals, but none of them are a linear to our time. It's easy to get caught in the fun of figuring out the history of certain things, but history isn't always as straightforward as it might seem (it makes majoring in History a little harder, that's for sure).

Holy shit, I don't think we have anything that weird here O_O

That's not a celebration per se. A Swedish town puts up a giant hay christmas goat every year in december and for the past 20+ years people have made sport out of trying to torch it before christmas.

Oh, okay then, I guess? It would be weird if that much fire was actually part of the festival, 'cause it's kinda dangerous.

Yeah, we celebrate that too! It's called Jonines(Jonas is our version of the name Hans) and you stay up all night, looking for the mystical fern blossom that is supposed to give you eternal wisdom and the ability to see hidden treasures or something. I think some places have competitions over who can build the highest bonfire...
I think the more international version of this is called Midsummer's eve?

What the fuck, Lithuania has the best weird holidays.

Let's try and explain Cince De Mayo and St Patricks Day to non-americans next.