Weird Holidays Around the World
Weird holidays around the world prove that every country thinks its own celebrations are perfectly normal and everyone else’s are completely unhinged. Having grown up in England, moved to the US, and visited 36 countries in between, I can confirm: nobody’s holidays are normal. Somewhere right now, someone is jumping over a baby, feeding a log, or racing downhill after a wheel of cheese, and to them, it’s just Tuesday.
This is a running list of the weirdest, strangest, and most gloriously unusual holidays around the world, organized by country. Some of these date back centuries. Others exist because someone decided bubble wrap deserved its own day. All of them are real.
Weird Holidays by Country
Every country has at least one holiday its own citizens struggle to explain to outsiders. Britain has a hill you’re more or less allowed to injure yourself on for cheese. Japan has a fertility festival built around a giant pink sculpture. America has an unofficial national day for nearly everything, several of which involve talking to your cat.
Below, I’ve broken these down by country so you can see exactly who’s responsible for what.
Weird Holidays in the United States
America doesn’t really do “a weird holiday” so much as it does thousands of them. There’s an unofficial national day for almost anything you can name, and most were invented in the last few decades purely because someone had a calendar slot to fill. Here are the ones that actually stuck.
National Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day
Falling on the last Monday in January, this one exists purely so adults have official permission to pop bubble wrap without anyone raising an eyebrow. It’s not deep. It was never meant to be.
National Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day
Every January 22nd, cat owners across the country are invited to imagine what their cat would ask if it could talk, which, if you’ve ever locked eyes with a cat mid-stare, is a genuinely unsettling exercise. Nobody’s quite sure who started this. Every cat owner has somehow heard of it anyway.
National Nothing Day
January 16th was set aside to celebrate, quite literally, nothing. It was invented as a protest against the sheer number of commemorative days already crowding the calendar, which makes it, by some distance, the most self-aware entry on this list.
World UFO Day
July 2nd belongs to believers and skeptics alike, who spend the day looking skyward, swapping sighting stories, and agreeing to disagree about what’s actually up there.
International Caps Lock Day
On June 28th (some diehards also mark it on October 22nd), the internet gives itself permission to TYPE IN ALL CAPS FOR AN ENTIRE DAY. Less a holiday, more a mass, coordinated cry for attention.
Talk Like Yoda Day
May 21st asks Star Wars fans to speak only in Yoda’s backwards syntax, “strong with the Force, you are”, for as long as they can manage it, which for most people is about four sentences.
National Selfie Day
June 21st exists to celebrate the selfie, a habit so deeply wired into modern life it barely needed its own holiday. Here we are anyway.
Unusual Holidays in Japan
Japan pairs centuries-old ritual with an almost aggressive embrace of the absurd, occasionally in the same festival. A few of these are genuinely sacred. One exists because a fried chicken chain ran an extremely good ad campaign in the 1970s.
Kanamara Matsuri
Held every spring in Kawasaki, this fertility festival is famous for parading enormous, elaborately decorated phallic sculptures through the streets, official, family-attended, and about as subtle as it sounds. It now draws a genuinely huge international crowd, which tells you everything about how word travels.
Hadaka Matsuri
The “Naked Festival” takes place across several regions and mostly involves thousands of men in loincloths crowding together in freezing weather, chanting and competing for good luck. It looks less like a celebration and more like an extremely committed group dare, which, historically, is close to the truth.
Naki Sumo
At Naki Sumo, sumo wrestlers hold babies and actively try to make them cry, because tradition holds that a loud cry wards off evil spirits and brings good health. It’s one of the only festivals on earth where making a baby sob is the entire point of the event.
KFC Christmas
Christmas was never a major religious holiday in Japan, but thanks to a wildly successful marketing push in the 1970s, ordering a Christmas KFC bucket has become a genuine national tradition, with families placing orders weeks in advance to dodge the lines. Colonel Sanders, more or less by accident, became Santa.
Cat Day
February 22nd, 2/22, was chosen because the numbers sound like a cat’s meow in Japanese, which is either the most logical or the most Japanese reason a holiday has ever existed. Cat owners mark it with themed goods and, presumably, a lot of studiously ignored affection.
Strange Celebrations in the United Kingdom
As a Brit, I’m more or less contractually obligated to tell you these are all completely normal. They are not. Britain has spent centuries turning local eccentricity into tradition, and these are the ones strange enough to survive.
Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling
Every spring in Gloucestershire, competitors chase an 8-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down a hill steep enough to be genuinely dangerous. The cheese, unfairly, gets a head start and reaches speeds fast enough that catching it stops being the point. Staying upright is.
World Bog Snorkelling Championships
Held in Wales every August, this one asks competitors to swim a length of muddy peat bog wearing flippers and a snorkel, with normal swimming strokes banned outright. It looks exactly as miserable as it sounds, and people fly in from other countries to do it anyway.
Weighing of the Mayor
In High Wycombe, the mayor is publicly weighed at the start and end of their term, a custom that began as a blunt way of checking whether they’d gotten fat off the public purse. It’s since aged into pure pantomime, but the pettiness of the original idea is worth appreciating.
World Gurning Championships
Contestants place their head through a horse collar and pull the ugliest face humanly possible, competing for the title of best “gurn.” There’s no closer British equivalent to keeping a straight face while doing something deeply undignified.
World Nettle Eating Championship
Held in Dorset, this one started as a pub dare and somehow became an actual competitive event: eat as many raw stinging nettles as you can. Nobody wins this one gracefully.
Weird World Days in Mexico
Mexico’s unusual holidays tend to carry real weight behind them, centuries of Indigenous tradition layered with Catholic influence, which is part of what makes them so compelling. These aren’t odd purely for the sake of it.
Day of the Dead
Held November 1st and 2nd, Día de los Muertos isn’t a holiday about mourning. Families build bright altars, decorate graves with marigolds, and celebrate the lives of people who’ve passed rather than grieving their absence. It’s one of the only “death” holidays that actually feels joyful.
Night of the Radishes
Every December 23rd, the city of Oaxaca hosts a competition where artists carve oversized radishes into astonishingly detailed sculptures, a tradition running continuously since 1897. It remains one of the strangest applications of a root vegetable I’ve come across.
Burning of Judas
During Easter, papier-mâché figures stuffed with fireworks are exploded in the streets. Originally meant to depict Judas Iscariot, the effigies just as often represent celebrities or politicians now, which tends to make each year’s version feel a little more pointed than the last.
Day of the Three Kings
On January 6th, Día de los Reyes Magos marks the Three Wise Men’s arrival with a sweet bread called Rosca de Reyes. Whoever finds the small figurine hidden inside is stuck hosting a tamale feast a few weeks later, arguably the best “congratulations, now do more work” tradition on this entire list.
Guelaguetza Festival
Held each July in Oaxaca, this festival brings communities together for traditional dance, music, and food, with one standout custom: throwing gifts and local products into the crowd as an act of generosity. Bring a bag.
Weird Holidays in Spain
Spain has cornered the market on holidays that look completely unhinged to outsiders and are treated with total seriousness by everyone actually there, which is, frankly, the best kind of weird.
La Tomatina
On the last Wednesday in August, the town of Buñol turns into the site of the world’s largest tomato fight, with thousands of people pelting each other until the streets run red. It lasts about an hour and requires a genuinely alarming amount of cleanup afterward.
El Colacho
Also known as the Baby Jumping Festival, this Corpus Christi tradition in Castrillo de Murcia involves men dressed as devils leaping over rows of babies laid out on mattresses, a ritual believed to cleanse them of evil. It’s, by some distance, the most-searched entry on this entire list.
Caga Tió
A Catalan Christmas tradition built around a smiling wooden log that children “feed” in the days before Christmas, then beat with sticks while singing, until it “poops out” sweets and small gifts. Explaining this one to a non-Catalan is a genuine challenge.
Caganer
The Caganer is a small figurine, mid-poop, hidden inside Catalan nativity scenes, tied to ideas of fertility, luck, and keeping the sacred scene grounded in ordinary human life. Somehow both irreverent and completely accepted.
Els Enfarinats
Held each December in Ibi, this festival stages a mock town takeover complete with flour, eggs, and firecrackers. Loud, extremely messy, and about as close as this list gets to organized chaos with a permit.
Weird Holidays in Thailand
Thailand’s festivals swing between genuinely spiritual and gloriously over the top, sometimes within the same event.
Monkey Buffet Festival
Every November, the town of Lopburi lays out an enormous feast, literal tons of fruit, vegetables, and sweets, for the local macaque population, as thanks for the tourism they bring. The monkeys, it should be said, do not RSVP politely.
Songkran
Thailand’s New Year festival in April started as a gentle water-pouring blessing and has since escalated into one of the largest public water fights on the planet. Nobody leaves this one dry.
Phi Ta Khon
Known as the Ghost Festival, Phi Ta Khon fills the streets of Dan Sai with colorful ghost masks, dancing, and music, blending local legend with Buddhist merit-making.
Vegetarian Festival
Phuket’s Vegetarian Festival is rooted in purification, but its most famous element is far less serene: devotees taking part in dramatic body-piercing rituals and firewalking. Not for the squeamish, spectator or otherwise.
Rocket Festival
Known as Bun Bang Fai, communities in northeastern Thailand launch homemade rockets skyward before the rainy season to encourage rain, turning an agricultural ritual into a genuinely chaotic competition.
Weird Holidays in Germany
Germany’s odder holidays tend to cluster around winter and old folk belief, with at least one that’s stranger in name than in practice.
Walpurgis Night
On April 30th, particularly in the Harz Mountains, Walpurgis Night marks old beliefs about witches gathering before May Day, celebrated now with bonfires, costumes, and music that leans satisfyingly eerie.
Krampusnacht
December 5th brings out Krampus, the horned counterpart to Santa who punishes naughty children rather than rewarding good ones. Modern parades lean fully into the theatrics: bells, masks, chaos.
Cologne Carnival
Cologne’s Carnival peaks just before Lent with parades and street parties, but its strangest moment might be Women’s Carnival Day, when women traditionally cut off men’s ties as a symbolic power grab.
Christmas Pickle
A pickle-shaped ornament is hidden on the tree, and whichever child finds it first gets an extra gift. Worth noting: this one’s more American invention wearing a German costume than an actual German tradition.
Wurstmarkt
Held in Bad Dürkheim, Wurstmarkt translates to “sausage market” despite actually being one of Germany’s biggest wine festivals, a naming decision nobody has bothered to correct in centuries.
Weird Holidays in Finland
Finland treats “weird” as a design brief. These aren’t accidents of history so much as things Finns apparently decided to just go ahead and do.
Wife Carrying World Championship
Every summer in Sonkajärvi, competitors race an obstacle course while carrying their partner, with the winning team traditionally awarded the wife’s weight in beer. Sweden invented equality. Finland invented this.
Seven Sleepers Day
On July 27th, one unlucky local celebrity gets tossed into the water before sunrise, based on an old legend that sleeping in on this day makes you lazy for the rest of the year. Nobody’s exactly lining up to volunteer.
Air Guitar World Championships
Held every August in Oulu, competitors perform elaborate imaginary guitar solos for a title that is somehow taken completely seriously. The event’s unofficial motto, that a world full of air guitarists is a world without guns, is doing some heavy lifting.
Cell Phone Throwing World Championships
An entire competitive sport built around throwing a mobile phone as far as possible. It began as a joke and is now internationally recognized, which says a great deal about Finland’s sense of humor.
Day for Failure
October 13th asks people to talk openly about their mistakes rather than celebrate their wins, a refreshing, if slightly uncomfortable, break from most holidays’ insistence on success.
Unusual Celebrations in Australia
Australia’s strangest holidays tend to involve either no water at all or entirely too much of it, plus a fairly casual relationship with dangerous animals.
Henley-on-Todd Regatta
Alice Springs hosts a boat race with zero water. Teams carry bottomless boats across a dry riverbed, which is either the most Australian thing imaginable or a very elaborate excuse to day-drink outdoors.
Chinchilla Melon Festival
Queensland’s melon festival includes melon skiing, melon bungee, and competitive melon eating, all of which end in the same sticky, smashed outcome.
Darwin Beer Can Regatta
Boats built entirely from recycled cans and bottles compete here, with seaworthiness very much optional. Half the fun is watching them sink.
Tunarama Festival
Port Lincoln’s contribution to this list is tuna tossing, literally throwing a large fish as far as possible, turning the town’s fishing heritage into a genuinely competitive sport.
Camel Cup
Alice Springs again, this time with camel racing. The animals are famously stubborn, which makes every race some degree of chaos.
Weird Holidays in Peru
Peru’s traditions blend Indigenous and Catholic influence in ways that are often beautiful, and occasionally involve settling scores with your fists.
Takanakuy
Every Christmas Day in Chumbivilcas Province, people resolve personal disputes through organized, one-on-one fistfights. Once the fight’s over, they embrace and start the new year with a clean slate, genuinely one of the more sensible conflict-resolution systems on this list.
Inti Raymi
Cusco’s Festival of the Sun, held June 24th, honors the Inca sun god Inti with elaborate costumes, music, and historical reenactments, one of the most visually striking entries here.
Qoyllur Rit’i
This high-Andes pilgrimage takes place before the Feast of Corpus Christi, drawing thousands of hikers who blend Catholic belief with ancient Andean tradition in a genuinely demanding trek.
Yunza Festival
Marking the end of Carnival, a decorated tree covered in gifts is chopped down piece by piece until it falls, scattering presents for whoever’s fastest to grab them.
Virgen de la Candelaria Festival
Puno’s enormous February festival honors the Virgin of Candelaria with thousands of dancers and musicians in vivid costume, one of South America’s largest traditional celebrations and one of its most photogenic.
More Weird Holidays to Discover
If this list proves anything, it’s that “normal” is entirely a matter of where you happened to be born. Somewhere between baby-jumping, radish-carving, and log-feeding, people have found endless ways to turn an ordinary calendar into something worth showing up for.
For more, explore this week’s weird holidays, or check the full weird holidays calendar.