20 Religious Holidays That Used To Be Wildly Different

In medieval and early modern Britain, Christmas was the Lord of Misrule’s time of power. He was a peasant or low-ranking cleric chosen annually to orchestrate the merrymaking for 12 days, presiding over the celebration while turning social order upside down. The crowds that followed him went door to door at wealthy homes demanding food and drink. Those who refused might see their houses vandalized. Parliament, led by England’s Puritans, outlawed the festivities in the 1640s. But the peaceful, family-oriented Christmas we know didn’t emerge until nearly two more centuries later.

Allhallowtide was a three-day celebration that began on All Hallows’ Eve and concluded on All Souls’ Day, with All Saints’ Day in between. During those three days in Britain and Ireland, poor villagers and children went “souling” by singing door-to-door for soul cakes, spiced round breads. For each cake consumed, one prayed for a soul to be released from Purgatory, where Christians believed souls were cleansed prior to entering heaven. In Ireland and Scotland, people celebrated Allhallowtide by carving turnips, rather than pumpkins, and placing burning coals inside the vegetables, lighting up the night.

On February 15 each year, the Luperci, Rome’s priests of Lupercalia, would sacrifice goats and a dog in the Lupercal cave and smear blood on the foreheads of young men. They then cut the hides of the sacrificed animals into strips called februa and ran through the streets striking passers-by with them. Women welcomed the blows, thinking that the februa brought them fertility and easy delivery. Pope Gelasius I abolished the ceremony in 496 CE. No remnant of it survives in modern Valentine’s Day observances.

When Jerusalem still had a Temple during the Second Temple period, Passover celebrated the biblical exodus from slavery in Egypt. On Nisan 14, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims flocked to Jerusalem with unblemished lambs for the slaughter. While the Levites sang psalms, priests formed human chains to pass bowls of blood down the line and against the altar. Families then roasted their lambs all over the city to feast into the night. The Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, and the leaders of the Jews restructured the holiday around the home Seder.

In the days before the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE, Yom Kippur ceremonies were presided over by the High Priest, Judaism’s highest-ranking religious official. Each year, he selected two goats. One was slaughtered on the altar, while the other, the “scapegoat,” was ritually burdened with the priest’s spoken confession of all the people’s sins. It was then handed over to an attendant who took the goat out to the Judean desert, where he pushed it off a cliff at a place known as Azazel. With the Temple no longer standing, the day evolved into one of prayers, fasts, and synagogue services.

Every December for a week, the Roman festival celebrating Saturn, the god of harvest and plenty, turned society upside down. Courts closed, and slaveholders fed their slaves at the dinner table. Gambling with dice in public spaces, which was usually forbidden, became permissible. Citizens donned soft felt hats called pilleus to signal their liberty, and traded small presents: candles and clay figurines. It carried on through subsequent years of Christmas mischief, although not as a formal rite.

Long before alarm clocks and loudspeakers existed, cities throughout the Ottoman Empire and Middle East were roused from their slumber by a pre-dawn drum caller called the Mesaharati. Strolling down darkened streets hours before the first light of dawn, he marched with a small drum and a lantern, beating out rhythms and calling out individual families by name. The objective was straightforward: get everyone up and awake in time for Suhoor, the meal taken prior to beginning the day’s fast.

During Holy Week prior to Easter, whole towns would put on Passion plays. These plays would be performed for days at a time, reenacting Jesus Christ’s trial and crucifixion. In certain towns, local Catholic brotherhoods of disciplinantes would participate in Good Friday processions by self-flagellating (lightly whipping themselves). This was a church-sanctioned tradition each year.

Shia Muslims mark Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram, to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Hussein died at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. During the Safavid and Qajar dynasties in Iran, Ashura developed into Ta’zieh, open-air passion plays performed before crowds in an arena made of canvas called a tekyeh. The actors were armored and performed on live horses, mimicking the battle of Karbala. Thousands gathered in the tekyeh and were moved to publicly weep.

Prior to the coming of Christianity, Yule was a multi-day winter solstice celebration throughout Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England. It centered around blot, sacrificial feasts where chieftains and pagan priests slaughtered horses and cattle, smearing their blood over temple altars and drinking to Odin, the head of the Norse pantheon, and Frey, the god of harvest, for safe passage through the winter. During the 10th century, Norway’s King Hakon the Good enacted laws to change the timing of Yule to coincide with Christmas.

The story of Esther relates the Jews’ deliverance from Haman, a Persian courtier who plotted their annihilation. For generations afterward, Jews living along the shores of the Mediterranean and across Europe erected large effigies of Haman on mock gallows and burned them at public bonfires during the festival of Purim. In 408 CE, the Roman emperor Theodosius II outlawed the practice of burning effigies of Haman on gallows in the shape of a cross, after Roman officials declared that the cross-shaped structures were intended as an affront to Christian iconography. But the bonfires continued.

The feast of Corpus Christi was founded in the 1200s to commemorate the Eucharist, a sacrament representing the body of Christ for the Christian faithful. By the Middle Ages, Corpus Christi was the largest civic theater festival in Western Europe. In York and other English towns, the local craft guilds built and operated two-story movable platforms, known as pageant wagons. Bakers enacted the Last Supper, shipwrights constructed Noah’s Ark, and goldsmiths performed the Adoration of the Magi. Each guild staged one scene on its own wagon.

Saint John’s Eve falls around the summer solstice, the night before the feast of the Baptist, the man said to have baptized Jesus in Christian belief. Hillsides were ablaze with bonfires. Farmers took torches to their fields and livestock to protect against disease, and revelers jumped over the burning wood to bring good fortune and fertility to the coming harvest. At midnight, herb gatherers collected such crops as Saint John’s Wort to make remedies, believing they held greater medicinal properties on just this one night.

In pre-map days, the English parishes marked their territory during the three days leading up to Ascension Thursday in a ritual known as Beating the Bounds. Priests and churchwardens guided parishioners on a walk that might span several miles around the perimeter of the parish, and at each landmark, whether stone or tree, the children would be beaten with willow branches or lightly bonked on the head. This way, the kids would remember where the boundaries lay, should they ever have to testify in a court case over disputed lands many years later.

In the Julian calendar, December 13 happened to be the winter solstice. In the Swedish and Norwegian countryside, it was called Lussinatta. According to folklore, the night was haunted by a demon known as Lussi. She and her band of night spirits flew over the land, punishing all farms that had not yet completed their autumn threshing. To avoid punishment, people stayed up late, lit bonfires, and brought their animals inside. It wasn’t until the 1800s and early 1900s that Lussinatta became fused with the legend of Saint Lucy, a 4th-century martyr, to create the present-day procession.

The festival of Holi, the Hindu celebration of spring and the defeat of the demoness Holika and the survival of her pious nephew Prahlad, used to start with bonfires on Holi Eve. These fires were fueled by dried leaves and weeds, neem twigs, and branches to rid villages of dirt and disease. On the following day, people threw colorful dust known as gulal, a mixture of dried flowers and roots, namely turmeric, neem, and kumkum. According to Ayurvedic medicine, the herb-infused dust was beneficial for the skin during a time of change when the seasons shifted, and fever began to run rampant in spring.

Vesak is the most important holy day for Theravada Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, as it commemorates the birth, enlightenment and death of Gautama Buddha, founder of Buddhism. Prior to 1960, Vesak was observed primarily as a day of generosity and compassion, and so faithful laypeople purchased birds, fish, and livestock that were on their way to the slaughterhouse and set them free. Families would spend weeks creating bamboo-and-paper lanterns and attaching tiny oil lamps inside, then hang them outside their houses to represent knowledge triumphing over darkness.

Candlemas, or the Feast of the Presentation, falls on February 2 and commemorates the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the presentation of the Christ Child in the temple in Jerusalem. Parishioners used to bring all their candles for the coming year to church, where they were blessed and then carried home in a candlelit procession through the darkened church. Another European superstition held that if hibernating animals such as badgers emerged and saw their shadows, there would be another six weeks of winter. German settlers in Pennsylvania brought this tradition with them, replacing badgers with groundhogs.

Hanukkah celebrates the 2nd century BCE revolt by Judah Maccabee, head of the Hasmonean dynasty, against the Seleucid Empire, a Greek kingdom, and the subsequent rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. For centuries, Hanukkah was a relatively minor observance, one that involved lighting oil-burning menorahs, saying special blessings, and presenting children and teachers with small amounts of money (called gelt). The custom of giving large gifts only became widespread in North America in the 20th century, as Hanukkah matured alongside its commercialized neighbor, Christmas.

Diwali, or the festival of lights, commemorates the homecoming of Lord Rama from the ancient epic Ramayana and is dedicated to Lakshmi, the deity of prosperity. Traditionally, Hindu families would illuminate their thresholds with thousands of handcrafted clay lamps to receive Lakshmi’s blessings. Yet for traders and financiers throughout the subcontinent, Diwali signified the close of the fiscal year. It was then that shopkeepers engaged in the ritual of Chopda Pujan, the consecration of new account books after clearing prior balances. The pyrotechnic displays did not become part of Diwali until around the middle of the 20th century.

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