Reels tagged #festivals
Holi turns whole cities into a paint fight
On the day after the Holika bonfire, streets across India fill with people smearing each other in gulal — coloured powder that once came from neem, turmeric and flame-of-the-forest flowers. For one morning caste, age and rank are suspended.
Rio's Carnival is judged like a sport
Samba schools spend all year building floats and rehearsing thousands of dancers, then parade in the Sambadrome for a panel of judges scoring costume, rhythm, theme and harmony. Winning is a matter of neighbourhood pride.
Day of the Dead is a party, not a mourning
Families spend the night of 1-2 November in cemeteries with candles, marigolds and the favourite food of the dead. The belief is that the souls return, and they should arrive to laughter, not tears.
Diwali is lit by millions of tiny clay lamps
The festival of lights marks the triumph of light over darkness. Ayodhya alone has set world records with more than two million diyas burning along its riverbank in a single night.
Oktoberfest began as a royal wedding party
The first one was thrown in 1810 to celebrate Crown Prince Ludwig's marriage. Munich enjoyed it so much they repeated it every year — now six million visitors drink around seven million litres of beer.
La Tomatina uses 150,000 overripe tomatoes
Every August the Spanish town of Buñol trucks in tomatoes too soft to sell and lets 20,000 people throw them for exactly one hour. Rule one: squash the tomato before you throw it.
Songkran is the world's biggest water fight
Thai New Year began with gently pouring water over elders' hands as a blessing. It grew into three days of nationwide soaking with hoses, buckets and water guns in the hottest month of the year.
Lunar New Year triggers the largest human migration
In the weeks around Chinese New Year, hundreds of millions of journeys are made as people travel home for the reunion dinner — the biggest annual movement of people on Earth.
Yi Peng releases thousands of lanterns at once
In northern Thailand, paper khom loi lanterns are released together so the sky fills with drifting flames. Each one is meant to carry away bad luck from the year behind you.
Venice's masks once erased class
During Carnival, Venetians wore the bauta and volto masks to move through the city anonymously — nobles and servants gambling side by side. The republic eventually had to pass laws limiting when masks could be worn.
Japan forecasts cherry blossoms like weather
The sakura front is tracked nationwide so people can time hanami picnics to peak bloom. The trees flower for barely a week, which is exactly the point: beauty that does not last.
Burning Man builds a city that vanishes
Black Rock City appears in the Nevada desert with streets, art and tens of thousands of residents, then is dismantled so completely that organisers aim to leave no trace at all.
The bull run lasts under three minutes
Pamplona's encierro covers 875 metres of narrow street, and the bulls usually cover it in about two and a half minutes. Runners wear white with a red sash in honour of Saint Fermín.
St Patrick's colour used to be blue
Saint Patrick was originally associated with blue; green took over through the shamrock and Irish nationalism. Today the day is celebrated in more countries than any other national festival.
Eid begins only when the moon is sighted
The end of Ramadan is declared by the sighting of the new crescent, so the date can differ by a day between countries. The morning starts with mass prayer and charity given before it.
Hanukkah adds one candle each night
The menorah is lit progressively — one flame on the first night, eight by the last — commemorating oil that was meant to last a day and burned for eight.
Christmas markets are over 700 years old
Vienna's December market dates to 1298 and Dresden's Striezelmarkt to 1434. The wooden stalls, mulled wine and roasted nuts have barely changed since the Middle Ages.
Thanksgiving moved to help the economy
Franklin Roosevelt shifted the holiday a week earlier in 1939 to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. The backlash was so strong that Congress fixed the date by law in 1941.
Kumbh Mela is the largest gathering on Earth
Tens of millions of pilgrims bathe at the river confluence over a few weeks — a temporary tent city so large it is visible from space, built and dismantled each time.
Inti Raymi was banned for 400 years
The Inca festival of the sun was suppressed by Spanish colonists in 1572 and revived in Cusco in 1944 from historical accounts. It is now Peru's second-largest festival.
Notting Hill Carnival was born from riots
It began in the late 1950s as a response to racist violence against London's Caribbean community. It is now Europe's biggest street festival, with around two million people over a weekend.
Albuquerque's fiesta uses a wind 'box'
Balloons drift one way at low altitude and back the other way higher up — a local wind pattern that lets pilots return near their launch point. It is why the world's biggest balloon event is held there.
Harbin carves a city out of river ice
Blocks are cut from the frozen Songhua River and built into full-scale castles lit from within by coloured LEDs. The site covers hundreds of thousands of square metres and melts every spring.
Timkat re-enacts the baptism of Christ
Ethiopian Orthodox priests carry the Tabot — a replica of the Ark of the Covenant — under embroidered umbrellas to water, where crowds are sprinkled at dawn in a mass renewal of baptism.
Gion Matsuri floats use no nails
Kyoto's month-long July festival pulls yamaboko floats weighing up to 12 tonnes, assembled entirely with rope and wood joinery, then taken apart again each year. It dates to 869 AD.
Shetland burns a Viking longship every January
Up Helly Aa ends with a thousand torch-bearers circling a replica galley and hurling their torches in. The festival is Victorian, invented in the 1880s, but the Norse roots are real.
Korea's mud festival started as marketing
Boryeong's mineral-rich mud was being sold as cosmetics, so in 1998 the town threw a festival to promote it. Millions now come to wrestle and slide in the stuff every July.
Valencia burns a year of art in one night
Neighbourhoods spend months building giant satirical ninot figures, then set them all alight on 19 March. Only one, voted the public favourite, is pardoned and kept in a museum.
At Gerewol, men compete in a beauty contest
Wodaabe men of the Sahel paint their faces, line up and dance for hours, rolling their eyes and flashing their teeth — whiteness of eyes and teeth being the prized traits. Women choose the winners.
Naadam is called the 'three manly games'
Mongolia's national festival is wrestling, horse racing and archery — and the horse races are ridden by children, because the contest tests the horse, not the rider.