20 Wild Seasonal Festivals People Celebrated Centuries Ago

From December 17 to 23, in the days leading up to the winter solstice, Ancient Romans celebrated the midwinter holiday Saturnalia, named after the Roman god of agriculture, Saturn. There were no court cases and no school classes. Citizens threw aside their formal white robes and dressed in multicolored tunics, and slaves could speak freely with their masters and even play dice against them. One person in each household was chosen by dice as “the king of Saturnalia” and could call the shots during the household’s feast. The party-goers also gave each other little presents, such as candles and small clay figures. When the week was over, business continued as usual.

Samhain was one of the four Gaelic quarter days, celebrated from sundown on October 31 through November 1 in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. In Irish, Samhain merely means “summer’s end.” Cattle came down from summer mountain pastures for slaughter and winter shelter. Communities lit bonfires on hilltops, put out food for the spirits of the ancestors, and donned disguises because the boundary with the spirit world had worn thin. It was the day the farming calendar turned from summer into hard winter.

Held on the last Tuesday in January, Up Helly Aa is a torchlit fire festival that takes place in Lerwick, in Scotland’s Shetland Islands. It was created by Victorian Shetlanders in the 1870s and 1880s as a replacement for a hazardous practice of rolling burning tar barrels around the streets. There is an elected leader, the Guizer Jarl, who leads a Viking-themed march of more than 1,000 torch-bearing “guizers” that culminates with the burning of a handcrafted replica longship. The aesthetic is ancient Norse, but the festival is Victorian.

Each June in Cusco, present-day Peru, Inti Raymi, or “Festival of the Sun,” was held as a winter solstice festival of the Inca Empire starting in the 15th century during the reign of Emperor Pachacutec. The Sapa Inca, or Inca emperor, stood with other priests and nobles at the Qorikancha temple, where they offered chicha beer and sacrificed llamas in hopes that the sun god Inti would not leave the earth. The ceremony was outlawed by Spanish authorities in 1572 and remained prohibited for almost 400 years until scholars from Peru brought it back.

In medieval and early modern England, Hocktide was celebrated on the Monday and Tuesday after the second Sunday after Easter. People of the opposite sex took turns capturing each other with ropes, commonly women on Monday and men on Tuesday. They would hold them captive until they paid a ransom fee, generally very low, for their freedom. The money raised each year went towards the repair and maintenance of the local church. In her research on churchwarden accounts, historian Katherine French found that women consistently raised two or three times as much money as the men did.

Mari Lwyd is a Welsh midwinter custom performed at Christmas and New Year in South Wales, first clearly documented around 1800. The Mari Lwyd is a horse’s head, actually a real horse’s skull attached to a pole, with glass eyes and a jaw that hinges on a spring, carried by a group of revelers covered with a white sheet and ribbons. At each house, they engage in a bidding war, called pwnco, trading improvised rhyming insults and boasts with the inhabitants until they are allowed in for refreshments.

The harvest festival, Pongal, is celebrated for four days in mid-January in Tamil Nadu, South India. This date is associated with a harvest of winter crops. Pongal’s history extends back to the Sangam period, roughly from 200 BCE to 300 CE. The first day, called Bhogi Pongal, begins with bonfires outside homes where people burn unwanted household items and other belongings. On the second and main day of the festival, people boil newly harvested rice in clay pots with milk and jaggery outside their homes and call out “Pongalo Pongal!” when the mixture overflows, then offer it to the sun god, Surya.

Nowruz (“New Day”), the Persian New Year, is celebrated on the actual day of the spring equinox throughout Greater Iran and Central Asia. It has been observed for millennia in the Iranian and Zoroastrian traditions that focus on seasonal change. Prior to the equinox, families do their spring cleaning, called khaneh takani (“shaking the house”), and then they have 13 days of celebration ending with a picnic outdoors to avoid bad luck. The more modern practice of having a Haft-Sin (the table of seven) did not become widespread until hundreds of years later during the Qajar era.

Chuseok (추석) translates as “Autumn Evening” and is Korea’s Thanksgiving for the fall harvest, celebrated under a full moon. It dates back to the Three Kingdoms and Goryeo periods. Families gather in their ancestral villages, make songpyeon (송편), half-moon rice cakes steamed on pine needles, and perform charye (차례), memorial rites featuring offerings of newly harvested rice and fruit. Women also often take part in ganggangsullae (강강술래), a dance in a circle by the light of the moon, which is performed to ensure a good harvest.

The Busójárás is a Slavic (Šokci) end-of-winter carnival tradition in Mohács, Hungary, which was added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List. Each year, at the end of February, men called Busós wear hand-carved wooden horned masks and sheepskin coats strung with cowbells. They take a boat across the Danube River to parade through the streets and burn a coffin representing winter. According to local folklore, they did so to frighten away Turkish invaders in 1526. In reality, the Turks won the battle that year.

The Roman state festival known as Floralia took place annually from April 28 to May 3. It celebrated Flora, the goddess of flowers and young crops, and began after spring storms damaged the crops. Romans changed their usual white togas to colorful clothes, and adorned themselves and their beasts with garlands of flowers. They threw beans into the crowd to promote fertility. There were theatrical games at the Circus Maximus, in which sex workers played a recognized part in the performance, and people across every level of Roman society took part.

Setsubun literally means “seasonal division,” and it’s a Japanese festival taking place in early February on the day before the start of spring according to the old calendar. It developed from 8th-century court purification rituals in the Heian period. In the mamemaki, or bean-throwing ritual, family members hurl roasted soybeans and chant “Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!” (“Demons out, fortune in!”). They then proceed to eat a number of beans equal to their age plus one. The now-popular practice of eating uncut sushi rolls during Setsubun originated in Osaka and didn’t become widespread until it was promoted by convenience stores in the 1990s.

Tu BiShvat occurs on Shevat 15, in January or February. This holiday was established in the era of the Mishna in ancient Judea as the “New Year of the Trees.” Originally, it marked a deadline by which to calculate fruit tithes, a religious tax on agricultural produce. The timing coincided with a time when winter rains subsided, and the sap started flowing in trees throughout the Levant, the region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Jews in subsequent generations evolved Tu BiShvat into a celebration of nature, marked by eating the “Seven Species” of the Bible and planting trees.

Whitsun Ales were village fairs held at Whitsuntide, the week following Pentecost (a Christian feast held seven weeks after Easter), in many English villages during the medieval and early modern periods. The churchwardens of each parish would purchase malt, brew large quantities of ale, and construct timber bowers decorated with flowers. Villagers would drink the ale inside these bowers while watching the Morris dancers, a popular traditional English folk dance. All of the profits from the sale of the ale went into the parish chest, where they were used to pay for the upkeep of the church roof, bridges, etc., and aid for the poor.

Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael, was celebrated on September 29 and was one of four “quarter days” that divided up the medieval and early modern English year, the fixed days when rent was due and legal terms began. It signaled the end of the grain harvest. Tenant farmers paid the autumn rents of their lands, towns held hiring fairs for farm laborers, and families roasted the stubble goose, fattened by eating grain left behind in the harvested fields, for good luck.

Martinmas fell on November 11 and was widely celebrated throughout medieval and early modern Europe. Since there wasn’t enough winter fodder for all the farm animals, peasants killed extra animals and cured the meat in order to eat during the long winter. At this time, farm workers received their annual salaries, and contracts for the next season were signed. Roasted St. Martin’s geese were eaten, new wine was sampled, and bonfires were lit. It has no connection to Armistice Day.

Across Gaelic Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, Beltane was celebrated on May 1, starting the previous night. As one of the four seasonal quarter days in the Gaelic calendar, it marked the onset of summer. This was when herders would move their cattle from lowland winter shelters to the highland summer grazing lands. To ensure that their livestock were healthy and safe, they passed them through two bonfires burning with fresh “needfire,” made from the friction of wood, while also decorating their doorways with spring blooms and sharing communal feasts.

August 1 was Lammas, from the Anglo-Saxon loaf-mass, or Lughnasadh in Gaelic. This was the start of the harvest of wheat and barley, just after the hungry gap, a period when the grain stores had been used up but the new harvest wasn’t due yet. Loaves made from the first cut grain were blessed by churches, and in Ireland and Scotland, people would climb hills to gather bilberries, race horses, and hold hiring fairs.

The Feast of Midsummer Eve (St. John’s Eve) took place around June 23 or 24 (the time of the summer solstice), and was observed in Scandinavia, the Baltic, France, Britain, and parts of Central Europe. In country districts, hilltop bonfires were lit to keep the growing darkness at bay, now that the days were beginning to shorten, and to frighten away the spirits of darkness who were believed to be on the loose. Youngsters collected wild herbs that were said to be most potent on this night, and danced around floral maypoles.

Tsukimi (literally “moon viewing”) originated as a courtly pastime in Heian-era Japan but later became a general harvest thanksgiving custom among rural farming families looking to express gratitude for their autumnal yield. Families would adorn their homes with the long blades of pampas grass, said to repel malevolent spirits, and arrange stacks of dumplings, known as tsukimi dango, for offering beneath the sky’s most luminous full moon, typically in September or October. There were no bonfires, no costumes, no mock kings. Just quiet gratitude for a bumper harvest.

This content was created with the help of AI.