The peoples of the world are united in one thing.  Every culture has what outsiders would consider to be strange traditions and celebrations.  

Many of which happen during the solstice – summer or winter.

One of the strangest, if you think about it:  A fat, bearded guy in a red suit named Santa lives at the North Pole and rides around in a flying sled powered by reindeer. He enters houses through the chimney in the dead of winter.

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Or this one: Babies born during the previous twelve months are laid down on mattresses in the middle of a village street. Meanwhile, all the adult men of the village take turns jumping over them.

[Also known as the baby jumping festival, this cringe-worthy celebration occurs every year on the Catholic feast of Corpus Christi in the Spanish village of Castrillo de Murcia.  The origins of the tradition are unknown but it is said to cleanse the babies of original sin and and guard against illness and evil spirits.  Apparently there are usually some injuries, which (thankfully) only involve the jumpers.]

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Or how about this one?

On a beach in San Francisco on the night of the summer solstice, a group gathers to burn a wooden effigy of a man as a spontaneous act of “radical self-expression.”  [That was 1986 and there were 20 people there.  In 2014, nearly 66,000 people paid $380 to gather in the desert in northern Nevada for a week-long, “experiment in community, art, radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.”  [You may have heard of it?:  Burning Man.]

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In Ancient Rome the winter solstice festival Saturnalia lasted for seven days, to honor Saturn, the father of the gods. It was characterized by the suspension of discipline and reversal of the usual order:

• Grudges and quarrels were forgotten
• Wars were interrupted or postponed
• Slaves were served by their masters
• A mock king was chosen from a group of slaves or criminals and was permitted to behave in an unrestrained manner for seven days of the festival.  (Bummer for him, though – he was usually killed at the end.)

The Saturnalia eventually degenerated into a week-long spree of debauchery and crime – giving rise to the modern use of the tern saturnalia, meaning a period of unrestrained license and revelry.

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From my personal experience:

In India, I was traveling by train when a guy got onboard – his hair and white tunic covered with blood. I had been reading a book about the partition of 1947 – when Britain granted independence to India, and divided the country into two: Pakistan (mostly Muslim) and India (mostly Hindu). It didn’t go well: there were horrific acts of genocide on both sides during the largest mass migration in history.

All I could think about when this wounded man boarded the train was that history was repeating itself – though it was strange that he was laughing and in very good spirits. I was hugely relieved to learn that he was celebrating the springtime festival of Holi. Anyone brave enough to venture out is certain to be doused with colored water and powdered pigment.

It’s one of the few regrets I have from that journey – that I heeded the warning of a guy when I arrived at my hotel. He told me it was dangerous for tourists, so I didn’t venture outside to have an experience of holi.

Someday . . . I’ll go back to India during Holi!

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In December of 1978, when I was a hippie backpacker, I trekked through the hills north of Chiang Mai, Thailand to visit the indigenous hill tribes. It was around the time of the solstice, and there was a big festival in an Ahka village, a 2 ½-hour hike into the mountains.  We arrived to find women and girls in elaborate costumes and head-dresses. Most of the men and boys were in western clothes. There was to be a big celebration at the “embracing grounds” – where girls and boys “couple up.”  I learned that free love is practiced before marriage as soon as a girl reached puberty. The boys were all drunk on rice whisky and were all checking out the girls from top to bottom – very much like a “meat market.” I couldn’t get over how young they all were.

There was also an obnoxious German guy with a video camera (such devices were not common back then), who was trying to choreograph the dances for his video. I was tempted to create my own festival which would have included isolating and torturing tourists like him.

The following morning, after a restless night sleeping on a floor made of bamboo slats, I was awakened to what sounded like a squealing pig. Turns out it WAS a squealing pig. I peeked outside my crude wooden hut just in time to see two guys restraining a large pig, as a third guy wielded a large knife. Horrified, I ducked back inside the house … and the pig squealed no more.

For sure, it was the most gruesome wake-up call I’d ever experienced. They spent most of the rest of the morning dividing everything – tail, intestines, blood, snout, etc. – among 15 different families. They weighed everything to ensure that everyone got equal portions.

Unfortunately, they insisted upon sharing some of their feast with us, so I had an unexpected opportunity (first and only time in my life!) to taste raw pork with chilies and fried blood. For breakfast. Where was that German when I needed him?

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Festivals involving “throwing things” seem to be common:

• A street fight between teenagers using tomatoes from nearby vegetable stalls has turned into the largest tomato fight in the world. It happens every year in the small Spanish town of Bunyol and over the course of about an hour the town gets so covered in tomatoes that the fire department has to come in and spray everything down.
• Every summer in the town of Boryeong, South Korea an international mud fight attracts millions of visitors from all over the world. It was originally intended to be a marketing vehicle for local cosmetics producers who use the mineral-rich mud in their products.
• Around the turn of the 20th century a volcano almost completely destroyed the small town of Nejapa in San Salvador. Every year since then residents gather in the town square for an appropriately-themed celebration consisting of throwing flaming rags at one another.

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Night of the Radishes: Not a vegan horror film, it’s a festival celebrated just before Christmas in southern Mexico. Street vendors whip out specially-grown, oversized radishes and proceed to sculpt them into some really cool shapes. Some are as much as three feet long.

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Every year near Gloucester, England hundreds of people gather to watch as locals chase a huge cheese off the top of Cooper’s Hill and tumble a couple hundred yards to the bottom where they are almost inevitably scooped up by paramedics and taken to the hospital. Winner gets the cheese.

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What is it about those Spaniards?

• Every year the town of Laza in northern Spain holds a festival called Entroida that involves people throwing muddy rags at one another. Wait – it gets worse. While everyone is in the town making a mess of themselves, other young men collect fire ants from the mountain. After shoveling them into dirt-filled sacks they bring them back to the town where they douse them in vinegar to rile them up a bit. After this the only thing left to do is take the angry fire ants around town and throw them into people’s faces.  Seriously??
• Everyone’s heard about the Pamplona Bull Run. It’s part of the Fiesta San Fermin which takes place every July. Runners must be 18+ and sober. No sanity check, obviously.

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In Alaska, in celebration of the state’s official animal, the festival highlight in the small town of Talkeetna involves dropping loads of moose poop onto targets from hot air balloons. (There’s a Sarah Palin joke in here somewhere …)

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Okay – this one is really weird.  Frozen Dead Guy Days

(told you!)

In 1989, a Norwegian citizen brought the corpse of his recently deceased grandfather, Bredo Morstol, to the U.S. The body was preserved on dry ice for the trip, and was thereafter stored in liquid nitrogen at a cryonics facility in northern California.

In 1993, Bredo was returned to dry ice and transported to the town of Nederland, Colorado, where the family planned to create a cryonics facility of their own.  When the grandson was deported for overstaying his visa, his mother then kept daddy’s body cryogenically frozen in a shack behind her unfinished house. Authorities evicted her for living there without electricity or plumbing. She confided to a local reporter about her fear that the body would thaw out.

Not surprising, the story caused a sensation. The city added a provision to their Municipal Code, “outlawing the keeping of dead bodies, in whole or in part …”  However, Bredo was granted an exception under a “grandfather clause.”  (Get it?)

Starting in 2002, Nederland holds an annual festival that includes coffin races, a slow-motion parade and a Frozen Dead Guy lookalike contest. There’s a dance called “Grandpa’s Blue Ball.”  A local ice cream company makes a custom flavor called, appropriately enough, Frozen Dead Guy. It consists of fruit-flavored blue ice cream mixed with crushed Oreo cookies and sour gummy worms.

Mark your calendar:  March 6-8, 2015!  (A WOW! Travel Club event, perhaps?)

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