Weird Holidays That People Actually Celebrate!

I honor of the upcoming holiday season, I thought I'd highlight some other holidays that are celebrated. While everyone is familiar with Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and New Years, there are a bunch of less than famous holidays celebrated every single day in some part of the world. As you may expect, most of the time the celebration is relatively straight forward. People eat, drink, have a parade, dance, etc. Sometimes however, things get a little... erm... hmm... strange, shall we say? There are dozens of really odd holidays out there, for instance feeding starving monkeys in Thailand or drenching yourself with smashed tomatoes in Spain. Below are what I believe to be the 3 strangest holidays that people actually celebrate:

#3 Tinku Festival

Where: Andes Mountains (Bolivia and Peru)

What: Each May, high up in the Andes mountains, thousands descend on the small city of Macha to partake in the traditional Tinku Festival. "Tinku" is a Quechua word meaning an encounter or a meeting, though when you take into account what actually happens at the festival, it should translate to "batter the crap out of someone".

During this ritual, men and women from different communities will meet and begin the festivities by dancing. The women will then form circles and begin chanting while the men proceed to fight each other; on rare occasions, the women will join in the fighting as well. During the brawl itself, men will often carry rocks in their hands to have greater force in their punches, or they will just throw them at opponents, which seems a little like cheating to me, but what do I know. Sometimes, men will wrap strips of cloth with shards of glass stuck to them around their fists to cause greater damage. Slingshots and whips are also used, though not as much as hand-to-hand combat. The last day of the fight is considered the most violent and police almost always have to separate the mass of bloody men and women.

Oh for futz sake, why? The Tinku Festivals aren't just people beating other people into a mushy pulp for fun. Instead it's an old religious festival based in pre-Hispanic times whereby the earth Goddess Pachamama demands blood to ensure a good harvest. The more blood, the better harvest. And Andeans, being a simple honest folk, could see no better way to get blood than to pummel the living snot out of their neighbors.

In the past, the fights frequently ended in death, as if one village had a poor harvest, the only way to guarantee a better one next year was to spill all the blood from your neighbors. Nowadays though, the festivals are policed, albeit lightly, and the police try and stop fights being more than one on one, and also to stop when the first blood has been shed.

#2 Battle of the Oranges

Where:  Ivrea in Northern Italy

What: The Battle of the Oranges is a festival in the Northern Italian city of Ivrea, which includes a tradition of throwing of oranges between organized groups. It is the largest food fight in Italy. This rather bizarre holiday involves thousands of townspeople (up to 10,000), divided into nine combat teams, who throw oranges at each other – with considerable violence – during the traditional carnival days: Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. The carnival takes place in February: it ends on the night of "Fat Tuesday" with a solemn funeral. 

Oh for futz sake, why? This festival celebrates a famous moment in Ivrea's history: a twelfth century revolt against a local tyrannical Count. In 1194, the fight for liberty consisted of a load of pissed off villagers throwing rocks at the henchmen of said local Count.

The exact story of what happened in 1194 is lost to time, but the legend is that the local Count, Conte Rainieri di Biandrate, made a law which allowed the horny bastard to have first crack at any newly-wed girl in the town. The Conte Rainieri di Biandrate's actions resulted in a load of pissed off Italians throwing first rocks at the count's guards and then oranges at each other.

#1 Antzar Eguan (Day of the Geese)

Where:  Lekeitio, in the Basque region of Spain

What: Antzar Eguna or "Goose Day" has its roots in at least 350 years of Spanish insanity. Antzar Eguna involves a group of young Spaniards trying to decapitate a dead goose hanging from a rope in the middle of the town's harbor, which just goes to show how a nice party can get out of hand.

The tradition used to be celebrated all over Spain until people realized that it was just too weird and they should just go back to doing normal stuff, like irritating a bull weighing half a ton. But, for some reason, the inhabitants of Lekeitio have hung on. Literally.

The rules say the contestants have to behead the goose using only their hands and arms. Are you ready for this?   In a rowboat, young men approach the dangling goose (which has been coated in grease), grab its neck, then fall into the harbor waters. Bystanders then yank the rope on which the goose is tied, heaving both bird and man up into the air, before dropping them back into the water again. The idea is to tear the goose's head off using that jerking motion.

If the youth is jerked free from the bird and plops into the harbor, he fails and another person has a go. If he manages to hold on to the bird despite the best efforts to shake him off and also manages to wrench the head off, he wins.  As a prize, the winner of the competition gets to keep the goose, and most likely, the prettiest girls in town flock into his goose blood-streaked arms.

Oh for futz sake, why?  No one seems to know. Really, would any explanation suffice?

This is done as part of the festival of St. Antolin, but there appears to be no record of the saint decapitating geese at any time during his ecclesiastical career, or even sitting down and thinking it might just be a fun idea for a party game.

It appears they just do it for the hell of it, and that may be the best reason of all.

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And I thought that Groundhog's Day was strange.  As I mentioned, these are just three of the weird and wacky holidays that people celebrate around the world.  The video below has a total of 25 strange holidays.