Every culture keeps time with holidays, and every holiday keeps a story: a lamp lit to guide someone home, a monster scared off with noise and red paper, a monk's private joke about crossed arms in prayer. This collection gathers festivals, customs, and dishes from a dozen faiths and traditions worldwide, tracing where each one actually began, not just where the postcard photo was taken. Some stories turn out to be exactly what everyone assumes. Plenty of others don't.
Every tile in a Holidays Around the World game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Holidays
nine stories
1A Zoroastrian new year that outlived an empire
On the tile: NowruzAncient Persia
Iran's new year begins at the exact moment of the spring equinox, a custom far older than Islam. Nowruz, Persian for "new day," began as part of the ancient Zoroastrian religion, welcoming the return of spring. Some scholars think the gift-bearers carved at Persepolis in the fifth century BCE are arriving for it, though others doubt that reading, and the first written descriptions come from the early centuries CE. When Arab Muslim armies conquered Sasanian Persia in the seventh century, the holiday persisted, and today it is celebrated from the Balkans to Central Asia.
In northern India, Diwali celebrates a homecoming. The epic Ramayana tells of Prince Rama, exiled from the kingdom of Ayodhya for fourteen years, who rescues his wife Sita from Ravana, king of the demons. As the reunited couple travels home, the story goes, people set lights on their doorsteps to help them find the way. The festival's name comes from the Sanskrit dipavali, "row of lights." The five-day festival is also sacred to Jains, who mark the liberation of Mahavira, and to Sikhs, who recall Guru Hargobind's return to Amritsar from captivity.
3The monster that gave New Year its noise and its color
On the tile: Lunar New YearLegend
Chinese folklore tells of Nian, a beast said to prey on villagers at the start of each new year until people learned it feared loud noise, fire, and the color red. The legend is often given as the reason families paste red paper on their doors and set off firecrackers at Lunar New Year. Red envelopes of money for children have a separate history: coin-shaped charms in the Han dynasty, cash gifts to children from the Song and Yuan, coins on red string under the Ming and Qing, and red paper wrappers only in the early 20th century.
4Two ancient answers to why Hanukkah lasts eight nights
On the tile: Hanukkah2nd century BCELegend
Hanukkah marks a real victory of the second century BCE: Jewish fighters known as the Maccabees drove Seleucid forces from Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple. Jewish tradition explains the holiday's length with a miracle, a single day's supply of lamp oil that burned for eight. That account first appears in the Talmud, centuries later; the books of Maccabees and the historian Josephus do not mention it. Second Maccabees gives another reason: the rededication was celebrated for eight days like Sukkot, the fall festival the fighters had been unable to keep during the war.
Eid al-Fitr closes out Ramadan, the month in which Muslims believe the Quran was first revealed, and it has no fixed date on the solar calendar. It begins when the new crescent moon marks the start of the month of Shawwal, and that moment is decided locally. Some authorities rely on astronomical calculation, others on sightings with the naked eye or telescopes, and cloud cover can delay a sighting, so neighboring countries sometimes celebrate a day apart. The festival fills the first three days of Shawwal with communal prayers, family visits, gifts, and shared meals.
Buddhists of the Theravada tradition mark three turning points of the Buddha's life on a single day. Vesak, held on the full moon of the lunar month Vesakha, commemorates his birth, his enlightenment, and his death, which Theravada communities came to hold all fell on that same date. In East Asia, by contrast, the day marks only his birth. The holiday's global reach is recent. The World Fellowship of Buddhists declared an international Vesak in 1950, and the United Nations recognized the day in 1999, citing Buddhism's contribution to human spirituality over two and a half millennia.
Kwanzaa has no ancient calendar behind it. Scholar and activist Maulana Karenga created it in 1966, in the aftermath of the Watts riots, as a way to give African Americans a shared cultural celebration rooted in the continent's harvest festivals. He drew on first-fruits traditions from peoples including the Ashanti and the Zulu and built the week around seven principles, the Nguzo Saba, expressed in Swahili: unity, self-determination, collective work, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith, one for each of the holiday's seven nights.
8An altar built to welcome the dead home for dinner
On the tile: Día de MuertosNov. 1-2
Día de los Muertos looks like mourning from the outside, but its central object, the ofrenda, is built for a visit, not a funeral. Families set up altars with photographs, favorite foods, and marigolds, believed to guide spirits home with their scent and color, on November 1 and 2. The holiday blends Catholic All Saints' and All Souls' observances, brought by Spanish colonizers, with Indigenous Mexican traditions honoring the dead that reach back thousands of years. UNESCO added the holiday to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2008.
9The god who started a color fight over his own skin
On the tile: HoliLegend
One popular origin story for Holi's colors begins with a young god's worry. In Hindu tradition, Krishna, usually shown with blue skin, asked his foster mother, Yashoda, why he was dark while his beloved Radha was fair. Yashoda playfully suggested he smear color on Radha's face and change her complexion to any shade he liked, and his play with colors became the festival's signature. The festival itself likely has far older roots: some versions of the Kamasutra call it Holaka. Today its powders carry their own meanings: red for love, yellow for new beginnings, green for spring.
1The loudest party trick started as a stalk of bamboo
On the tile: Fireworksc. 200 BCE
Long before gunpowder, people in China burned green bamboo stalks, and the air trapped in their hollow segments heated up until the stalks burst with a bang. That natural firecracker, dated to around 200 BCE, was used to scare off evil spirits with noise, and the Chinese word for firecracker, baozhu, still means "exploding bamboo." Centuries later, sometime between 600 and 900 CE, Chinese alchemists chasing the secret of eternal life mixed saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur and made an early gunpowder instead. Packed into bamboo or paper tubes, it gave the world its first true fireworks.
2Nobody agrees on which country gave us this party game
On the tile: PiñataLegend
Nobody knows for certain where the piñata began. One legend says Marco Polo saw hollow farm-animal figures filled with seeds in China and carried the idea home to Italy, from where it spread to Spain as a Lenten tradition. Another points to the Aztecs, whose celebration of the god Huitzilopochtli included a feather-covered pot, filled with small treasures and struck with a stick so its contents spilled at the idol's feet. The firmer record comes later: Mexico's first documented piñata hung at Acolman in the 16th century, at a December festival monks held to Christianize that same Aztec celebration.
3Begging for cake slowly turned into begging for candy
On the tile: Trick-or-Treat
Going door to door for Halloween treats is centuries older than the phrase that names it. In medieval England, poor people went "souling," promising to pray for a household's dead in exchange for soul cakes. In Scotland and Ireland, young people went "guising," trading a song, a poem or a joke for treats while in disguise. Irish and Scottish immigrants later revived both customs in the United States. The words "tricks or treats" first turn up in print in 1917, in a newspaper in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Wartime sugar rationing stalled the custom, and it boomed after World War II.
4A flower-viewing party that used to be about plums
On the tile: Hanami812
Japan's cherry blossom parties weren't always about cherry blossoms. The custom of gathering to admire spring flowers came from China, and at first Japanese aristocrats viewed plum blossoms, just as the Chinese did. The switch came in the Heian period (794-1185), as Japan's elite sought a cultural identity of their own; in 812, Emperor Saga hosted the first imperial cherry blossom viewing in Kyoto. The tree already mattered to farmers, who took its bloom as a sign to start planting rice, and one leading theory links the word sakura to a god of the rice fields.
5America swapped in a new animal for an old superstition
On the tile: Groundhog Day1887
Groundhog Day's shadow-watching superstition crossed the Atlantic with German settlers who came to Pennsylvania in the 1700s. Their Candlemas lore held that if an animal saw its shadow on February 2, winter would linger; in Germany the forecaster was a badger, or a hedgehog in some accounts. In Pennsylvania, the settlers switched to the groundhog, which was plentiful there. Punxsutawney held its first Groundhog Day at Gobbler's Knob in 1887, and Punxsutawney Phil has been making the call ever since. Federal climate scientists who grade his forecasts find he is wrong more often than right.
6A calendar term that turned into a nationwide water fight
On the tile: SongkranMid-April
Thailand's biggest water fight has a name borrowed from Sanskrit: songkran comes from sankranti, the sun's passage into a new sign of the zodiac. The festival probably traveled from South Asia with the Hindu and Buddhist ideas that spread through Southeast Asia in the first millennium CE, and it took on Buddhist meanings under the Khmer and Ayutthaya empires. Scholars think it also grew into a celebration of the rice harvest, which peaks in April. Splashing water began as a blessing meant to wash away the old year's bad luck, long before it became a nationwide soaking. Songkran was Thailand's official New Year until 1888.
7A fireworks ban created New York's biggest countdown
On the tile: Ball Drop1907
New York's Times Square ball drop exists because fireworks got banned. The square's first New Year's Eve party, in 1904, celebrated the new home of The New York Times and ended with fireworks set off from the base of its tower. Two years later the city banned the display, so Times owner Adolph Ochs had a lighted ball lowered from the tower's flagpole at midnight instead. A young immigrant metalworker, Jacob Starr, built that first ball, a 700-pound iron-and-wood sphere with 100 light bulbs, to welcome 1908. It has dropped almost every year since, pausing only in 1942 and 1943 for the wartime dimout.
8A Sicilian martyr who became Sweden's queen of light
On the tile: St. Lucia DayDec. 13Legend
Sweden's Lucia processions honor a martyr from Sicily: Lucia of Syracuse, killed for her faith in 304. Legend holds that she carried food to persecuted Christians hiding in the catacombs, wearing a crown of candles to keep her hands free. Her story is thought to have come north with missionaries, and it suited the midwinter dark: under the old Julian calendar, her December 13 feast fell on the longest night of the year. The earliest record of a white-clad Lucia comes from a Swedish estate in 1764, and the custom spread widely only after a Stockholm newspaper crowned a Lucia in the late 1920s.
9A permission slip started a nine-night nativity play
On the tile: Las Posadas1586
Las Posadas began as a piece of religious strategy. In 1586, Friar Diego de Soria, an Augustinian prior near Mexico City, won permission from Pope Sixtus V to hold special Masses from December 16 to 24, and missionaries used the season to teach Indigenous converts the story of Christ's birth. The custom that grew from those Masses reenacts Mary and Joseph's search for lodging in Bethlehem over nine nights, one for each month of Mary's pregnancy. Its timing was no accident: the missionaries merged it with an Aztec winter solstice festival already held that time of year.
Long before New Orleans bakers tucked a plastic baby into king cake, Europeans hid a dried bean in holiday cakes, and whoever found it was crowned king for the day. French and English records describe this "king of the bean" custom by the 1500s, part of the feasting around Epiphany on January 6. New Orleans got its baby, representing the infant Jesus, much later. The popular account credits baker Donald Entringer of McKenzie's in the 1940s: a traveling salesman with an overrun of tiny porcelain dolls from France suggested baking them in. When those ran out, plastic babies took over.
A popular legend says Chinese rebels of the 1300s hid slips of paper in mooncakes, calling for an uprising against the Mongol Yuan rulers on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival. It almost certainly never happened. The historian Hok-Lam Chan, who collected its many versions, called the idea that strategist Liu Bowen planned the hidden messages "preposterous." He traced the tale's spread to the late Qing dynasty, when anti-Manchu secret societies likely retold it to stir up Han Chinese feeling against their Manchu rulers. The festival itself is far older, a harvest celebration said to reach back more than 3,000 years.
3Hanukkah's fried favorite used to be made of cheese
On the tile: Latkes1322
The potato pancake wasn't always Hanukkah's signature dish, and for a long stretch it wasn't about potatoes at all. The earliest written mention of fried Hanukkah pancakes comes from a 1322 poem by Rabbi Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, describing levivot "large and round, the whole size of the frying pan." From the 14th century, Jews in Italy fried ricotta cheese pancakes for the holiday, while Eastern European cooks used rye or buckwheat. Potatoes reached Europe in the 1500s, but only after crop failures in Poland and Ukraine around 1840 did the tuber take over. The frying itself recalls Hanukkah's story of oil.
Legend credits panettone to a kitchen boy named Toni, who supposedly saved a Christmas banquet at the 15th-century Milan court of Duke Ludovico il Moro after the chef burned the dessert. Toni's rich, sweet loaf was a triumph and earned the name "pan de Toni." The tale itself seems to date only from the late 1800s. The real roots are plainer: Milan's bakers made prized wheat bread for Christmas, a custom on record in the 1300s. The tall, domed panettone came in the 1920s, when baker Angelo Motta wrapped a richer, slow-risen dough in paper so it climbed high.
5The bird nobody can place at the first Thanksgiving
On the tile: Turkey1621
Turkey feels inseparable from Thanksgiving, but nobody can say for certain it was served at the 1621 harvest celebration that inspired the holiday. Colonist Edward Winslow wrote that four men went fowling and that the Wampanoag leader Massasoit's men brought five deer. Governor William Bradford noted the colonists took many wild turkeys that autumn, yet a Plimoth Patuxet foodways expert suspects goose or duck was the likelier bird. The roast turkey tradition came later, helped along by editor Sarah Josepha Hale, whose magazine printed Thanksgiving menus for years before the holiday went national in 1863.
6A monk's Good Friday gift, then a queen's bun law
On the tile: Hot Cross Buns1361Legend
St Albans, England, claims the first hot cross bun. The story goes that in 1361 Brother Thomas Rocliffe, a monk at St Albans Abbey, had small sweet spiced cakes marked with a cross handed out to the poor at the refectory door on Good Friday. The account rests on an 1862 newspaper, and the cathedral says the original source is still being researched. Later history is firmer: in 1592, Queen Elizabeth I limited the sale of spiced buns to Good Friday, Christmas and burials. Folk belief added that a Good Friday bun would never go moldy.
7A wrapped meal for the road, the gods and Candlemas
On the tile: Tamalesc. 100 BCE
Tamales were feeding Mesoamerica long before the Spanish arrived. One of the oldest known images of them appears in the San Bartolo murals in Guatemala, dated to about 100 BCE. The name comes from the Nahuatl tamalli, meaning "wrapped," for corn dough steamed inside a husk or leaf. That wrapping made them ideal travel food; food historian Sophie Coe recorded special travelers' tamales said to keep up to twenty days. The Aztecs offered amaranth tamales to their gods, including the fire god Xiuhtecuhtli. In Mexico today, Candlemas on February 2 is the traditional day for tamales.
8A Roman energy bar became the holiday's running joke
On the tile: FruitcakeAncient Rome
Fruitcake's staying power has deep roots. The ancient Romans made a mash of barley, pomegranate seeds, nuts and raisins, a sort of energy bar. The fruitcake we know took shape in the Middle Ages, as dried fruits spread through Western European kitchens, and it went on to become a Christmas standard. Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding cake was a 300-pound fruitcake, and Prince William and Catherine Middleton still chose one in 2011. Somewhere along the way it also became the season's running joke: Johnny Carson quipped that there was only one fruitcake in the world, and people kept passing it around.
The pretzel's twist may be a picture of prayer. Lore says that around 610 CE, monks in Italy or France shaped dough to look like arms crossed in prayer. The legend is hard to prove, but the word fits it: German Brezel traces back to a Medieval Latin term built on bracchium, "arm." Baked without milk, pretzels suited the Lenten fast, and the church connection stuck. A Bremen guild chronicle of 1570 describes a small fir tree hung with fruit, pretzels and paper flowers for children to plunder at Christmas, one of the earliest recorded Christmas trees.
The word "holiday" is a worn-down version of "holy day." In Old English it was haligdaeg, joining halig, "holy," with daeg, "day," and it named Christian festivals and the Sabbath. By the 14th century the word carried two overlapping meanings, a religious festival and a day free from labor, and in the 16th century its pronunciation and its sense split apart: "holy day" kept the church, "holiday" kept the time off. The phrase "happy holidays" began in mid-1800s British English, referring to the summer break from school, and it was an American Christmastime greeting by 1937, when it appeared in cigarette ads.
2A Roman festival with no proven tie to Valentine's Day
On the tile: St. Valentine5th centuryLegend
Valentine's Day is often said to descend from Lupercalia, a raucous Roman festival in mid-February involving fertility rites, but historians say the link is mostly assumed rather than proven. There's no solid evidence Lupercalia's rituals shaped the choice of February 14, and Pope Gelasius I's move to ban Lupercalia at the end of the 5th century isn't reliably tied to establishing a saint's day in its place. The holiday's namesake is murky too: several Christian martyrs were named Valentine, and the earliest record connecting the date to romantic love doesn't appear until the 14th century.
The most repeated explanation for April Fools' Day says that when France moved New Year's Day to January 1 in 1564, people who kept celebrating the new year in spring became the butt of jokes. Historians are skeptical. Many French people were already starting the year on January 1 before the royal edict, and a Flemish poem from 1561 describes a nobleman sending his servant on fool's errands because it is April 1. No one has found a sturdier explanation. What's left is a holiday whose real origin nobody can pin down, which feels fitting for a day built on tricking people.
Halloween's roots run through Samhain, a festival of the Celts of ancient Ireland. It fell around November 1, when the new year was believed to begin and winter set in, and the souls of the dead were thought to return to visit their homes. People lit bonfires on hilltops and sometimes wore masks and disguises to avoid being recognized by ghosts. The church calendar met it later: in the 8th century Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel in Rome to all saints on November 1, perhaps partly to supplant pagan holidays, and the evening before, October 31, became All Hallows' Eve.
Nowhere in the Bible is Jesus's birth dated, and for its first two centuries the church doesn't seem to have celebrated it. In 221 a Christian historian, Sextus Julius Africanus, placed it on December 25, and by 336 the church in Rome was formally celebrating Christmas on that day. Why that date was chosen is still debated. One theory says it Christianized a Roman holiday for the birth of the Unconquered Sun, also on December 25. Another says theologians dated Jesus's conception to March 25, the same day they linked to his death, and counted forward nine months. Neither theory has settled the question.
6A minor Mexican holiday, misfiled as its biggest one
On the tile: Cinco de MayoMay 5, 1862Myth busted
Cinco de Mayo is widely assumed in the United States to be Mexico's independence day. It isn't: Mexican independence is celebrated on September 16, marking an 1810 uprising. Cinco de Mayo instead commemorates a single battle, fought decades later on May 5, 1862, when an outnumbered Mexican force under General Ignacio Zaragoza, estimated at 2,000 to 5,000 men, turned back roughly 6,000 invading French troops at Puebla. The victory didn't stop France's later occupation of Mexico, and the day itself remains a modest regional holiday there, celebrated far more enthusiastically north of the border.
Thanksgiving gets credited to Abraham Lincoln, but the campaign behind it belonged to magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, and it took her 36 years. She began writing essays calling for a national day of thanks in 1827, and in 1846 launched a letter-writing campaign to governors, editors and every president. On September 28, 1863, she wrote directly to Lincoln. Five days later he proclaimed the last Thursday of November a national day of thanksgiving, though Secretary of State William Seward actually wrote the proclamation. Thanksgiving has been celebrated every year since, which is why Lincoln usually gets the credit.
Labor Day's first celebration, a parade through Lower Manhattan organized by New York's Central Labor Union on September 5, 1882, is well documented. Who proposed it is not. Credit has long gone to carpenters' union leader Peter J. McGuire, but recent research points to machinist Matthew Maguire, then secretary of the Central Labor Union itself. Oregon became the first state to pass a law recognizing the holiday, on February 21, 1887. Amid the Pullman railroad strike of 1894, Congress and President Grover Cleveland made it a federal holiday on June 28, a few days before federal troops were sent to Chicago.
9A senator borrowed a campus protest to save the planet
On the tile: Earth DayApril 22, 1970
Earth Day's spark came from a plane ride, not a lab. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, shaken after seeing the aftermath of a 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara, read about how anti-war "teach-ins" were reshaping campus conversations and realized the same format could work for the environment. He set April 22, 1970, deliberately avoiding spring break and exam schedules, so teachers nationwide could hold a single day of environmental discussion. An estimated 20 million Americans took part, a turnout that helped push Congress toward major environmental legislation in the years that followed.