Christmas is a time of traditions, from decorating trees and hanging stockings to sipping eggnog by the fire. While these customs feel timeless, many of them have unexpected origins that stretch back centuries. Ancient pagan rituals, clever marketing campaigns, and practical adaptations have all played a role in shaping the holiday traditions we know today.

Over the years, these practices have evolved, blending influences from various cultures and eras. From the generosity of Saint Nicholas inspiring Christmas stockings to the Yule log’s transformation from a pagan fire ritual to a dessert, the history of these traditions is as diverse as it is fascinating. Here are 10 surprising origins behind some of Christmas’s most beloved customs.

Related: 10 Surprising Traditions Protected by UNESCO

10 Mistletoe: A Pagan Symbol of Fertility and Peace

Mistletoe has long been associated with love and romance during Christmas, but its origins trace back to ancient pagan practices. The Druids revered mistletoe as a sacred plant, believing it had magical properties to ward off evil spirits and bring fertility. During winter solstice ceremonies, they would cut mistletoe from oak trees with golden sickles and use it in rituals meant to ensure a bountiful harvest and protection for the coming year.

The tradition of kissing under mistletoe likely stems from Norse mythology. According to legend, the goddess Frigg declared mistletoe a symbol of love after it was used to resurrect her son, Balder. This association with peace and affection carried over into Christmas celebrations centuries later. The Victorians popularized the custom of kissing under the mistletoe, turning an ancient fertility rite into a romantic holiday tradition.^[1]

9 Christmas Stockings: A Charitable Legend of Saint Nicholas

The tradition of hanging stockings by the fireplace originates from a 4th-century legend about Saint Nicholas. According to the story, a poor widower with three daughters could not afford dowries for his girls, leaving them destined for a life of servitude. One night, Saint Nicholas secretly dropped bags of gold coins down the chimney, which landed in the girls’ stockings that were hung by the fire to dry.

This act of generosity became intertwined with Christmas gift-giving, and the tradition of stockings spread through Europe. In the United States, stockings became a Christmas staple in the 19th century, thanks in part to Clement Clarke Moore’s famous poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” which describes Santa filling stockings with toys. Over time, stockings evolved from practical socks to decorative, oversized versions made specifically for holiday gifts.^[2]

8 Christmas Trees: A Fusion of Pagan and Christian Traditions

The Christmas tree as we know it today has roots in pagan rituals that celebrated evergreen plants during the winter solstice. Ancient Romans used evergreen branches in their Saturnalia festivities, and Germans in the Middle Ages decorated fir trees in honor of the solstice as a symbol of hope and eternal life.

The Christian adaptation of the Christmas tree is often credited to 16th-century Germany. Legend has it that Protestant reformer Martin Luther was inspired by the sight of stars shining through the branches of a fir tree and brought one indoors, decorating it with candles. The tradition spread across Europe and was popularized in England by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the 19th century. When German immigrants brought the practice to America, it became an enduring symbol of the holiday season.^[3]

7 Eggnog: A Colonial Adaptation of a Medieval Drink

Eggnog’s origins date back to medieval Britain, where a drink called “posset” was made by curdling hot milk with ale or wine and adding spices. Wealthy families often included eggs and cream in their recipes, making posset a luxurious treat for special occasions. As the drink crossed the Atlantic with European settlers, it evolved into the eggnog we know today.

In colonial America, rum became the alcohol of choice for eggnog, as it was cheaper and more readily available than imported wine or brandy. The drink became especially popular during Christmas gatherings, where its richness symbolized abundance and celebration. Over time, eggnog became synonymous with holiday festivities, and its enduring popularity has even led to unique regional variations, such as Puerto Rico’s rum-and-coconut version, coquito.^[4]

6 Candy Canes: Religious Symbol or Sweet Marketing Ploy?

Candy canes are often said to represent religious symbolism, with the shape resembling a shepherd’s crook and the red and white stripes symbolizing Christ’s blood and purity. However, this interpretation is largely a modern invention. The earliest candy canes, created in 17th-century Germany, were plain white sticks of sugar candy given to children during nativity plays to keep them quiet.

The iconic red stripes and peppermint flavor were introduced in the 19th century, likely as a way to make the candy more visually appealing and marketable. By the early 20th century, candy canes became a staple of Christmas decorations and treats. Their enduring popularity owes as much to clever marketing as to their supposed religious connections.^[5]

5 Santa’s Sleigh: Borrowed from Norse Mythology

The image of Santa Claus flying through the night sky in a sleigh pulled by reindeer owes its origins to Norse mythology. In the pagan Yule tradition, Odin, the chief Norse god, was said to ride across the sky on an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir during the midwinter season. Children would leave offerings of food in their shoes for Sleipnir, and in return, Odin would reward them with gifts. This myth provided a foundation for the idea of a magical figure delivering presents, especially in regions where Norse traditions mingled with early Christian celebrations.

When Christianity spread across Northern Europe, Odin’s image merged with that of St. Nicholas, evolving into the figure of Santa Claus we know today. The sleigh and reindeer were later popularized in American culture through Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” which introduced the concept of Santa’s eight reindeer. Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer, entered the story much later in 1939 as part of a marketing campaign by Montgomery Ward. This fusion of ancient mythology and modern commercial storytelling created one of the most enduring and magical symbols of Christmas.^[6]

4 Gift Wrapping: A Japanese Tradition Turned Western Staple

Gift wrapping, often viewed as a quintessentially Western holiday custom, has its origins in ancient Asia. In Japan, wrapping gifts in furoshiki cloths dates back to the 8th century, when the practice was both practical and symbolic, protecting the gift while adding a personal touch. Similarly, in China, silk cloths were often used to wrap gifts during significant occasions, with elaborate designs symbolizing good fortune and respect. These traditions reflected the importance of presentation in gift-giving long before the advent of paper wrapping.

In the West, modern gift wrap owes its popularity to a happy accident in 1917. Joyce and Rollie Hall, founders of Hallmark, ran out of traditional tissue paper during the Christmas season. They improvised by selling sheets of decorative French envelope lining paper, which quickly sold out. Recognizing the potential, the Halls began producing their own colorful, sturdy wrapping paper.

By the mid-20th century, gift wrap had become a staple of holiday celebrations, with vibrant designs, ribbons, and bows turning the act of giving into a visual spectacle. Today, wrapping paper is a multi-billion-dollar industry, though eco-conscious alternatives like reusable cloths are reviving the ancient traditions it originally replaced.^[7]

3 Advent Calendars: From Religious Devotion to Chocolate Treats

Advent calendars began in 19th-century Germany as a way for families to count down the days until Christmas. Early versions were homemade, featuring candles, chalk marks, or devotional images to mark each passing day. By 1908, Gerhard Lang, a German printer, introduced the first commercially produced advent calendar, complete with small doors that opened to reveal Bible verses or festive illustrations. These early calendars emphasized religious reflection and anticipation during the Advent season.

The modern chocolate-filled advent calendar emerged in the mid-20th century as manufacturers sought to appeal to children. British and American companies like Cadbury began mass-producing calendars with tiny chocolates behind each door, making the tradition more about indulgence than spiritual preparation. Today, advent calendars have expanded beyond chocolate, offering everything from miniature toys to luxury beauty products. This evolution reflects how the tradition has shifted from its religious roots to a fun, highly commercialized part of the holiday season.^[8]

2 Christmas Cards: A Victorian Innovation

The Christmas card tradition began in 1843, thanks to Sir Henry Cole, a British civil servant who wanted an easier way to send holiday greetings. Cole commissioned the first commercial Christmas card, which featured a festive family scene and the message “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You.” These cards quickly caught on among the Victorian upper class as a fashionable way to convey holiday wishes without the need for lengthy handwritten letters.

The invention of affordable postage stamps, like the Penny Post in England, made sending cards accessible to a wider audience, and the trend soon spread across Europe and the United States. By the early 20th century, companies like Hallmark were mass-producing colorful and decorative Christmas cards, making them a staple of the holiday season. While email and social media have reduced the prevalence of traditional cards, they remain a cherished tradition for many, with millions still sent annually, often showcasing personal photographs or handmade designs.^[9]

1 The Yule Log: From Pagan Fire Ritual to Dessert

The Yule log tradition has roots in ancient Scandinavia, where it was a central feature of pagan midwinter celebrations. Families would select a massive log, decorate it with carvings or ribbons, and burn it in the hearth during the winter solstice to honor the Norse gods. The fire symbolized warmth, protection, and the return of the sun during the darkest days of the year. The ashes from the Yule log were often kept as charms to bring good luck and ward off evil spirits for the coming year.

When Christianity spread, the Yule log was incorporated into Christmas traditions, particularly in Northern Europe, as a symbol of light overcoming darkness. In the 19th century, French pastry chefs transformed the tradition into the bûche de Noël, a sponge cake rolled to resemble a log and decorated with frosting to mimic bark. This edible version of the Yule log became a popular Christmas dessert, blending ancient customs with modern holiday celebrations. Today, the Yule log exists both as a decorative symbol and a tasty treat, keeping its rich history alive in an entirely new form.^[10]

Holidays often have traditions, such as eating turkey for Thanksgiving, decorating with shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day, and carving jack-o’lanterns for Halloween.

Christmas is another holiday with many traditions. Some, like enjoying candy canes, oohing and aahing at decorated Christmas trees, and telling a mall or other store-based Santa what is on one’s gift list, came about long before the 20th century began.

Other Christmas traditions, such as the ones listed below, started within the past 100 years. Read on to learn more about some of these newer traditions.

Related: 10 Holidays No One Celebrates

10 Watching Network Television Christmas Specials

The distinction of oldest Christmas special exclusively for television is neither Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer nor A Charlie Brown Christmas, which premiered in 1964 and 1965, respectively. Rather, it is Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, a cartoon that debuted in 1962. The special was based on Charles Dickens’s novel with a similar-sounding name that tells the story of a selfish, unsympathetic businessman named Ebenezer Scrooge until several ghostly visitors help him see the errors of his ways.

Among the actors who provided their voices to Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol was Jim Backus, who would go on to star in Gilligan’s Island the following year, and Morey Amsterdam, who simultaneously worked on The Dick Van Dyke Show while the Christmas special was in production.^[1]

9 Conducting Toys for Tots Drives

The tradition of a big box with a Marine Corps Reserves Toys for Tots logo to place donations like dolls, toy trucks, and similar items began in Los Angeles in 1947. That’s when a Marine Corps Reserve member was strongly encouraged to start an organization that would distribute the dolls his wife had made to financially disadvantaged children when no such existing organization could be found.

In the campaign’s first year, 5,000 toys were collected and distributed. Since then and through 2023, roughly 677 million toys, books, and games have been given to 301 million financially disadvantaged children.^[2]

8 Listening to Radio Stations’ Christmas Music Marathons

Around 1990, management at an adult contemporary radio station based in Phoenix with the call letters KEZ went against the advice of its consultants and researchers and began playing nonstop Christmas music upon the end of Thanksgiving. Contrary to those consultants’ and researchers’ beliefs, the format proved popular and since then, hundreds of radio stations have followed the same commercial-free Christmas music format, although the date these stations start airing the songs varies.

In 2024, Chicago radio station 93.9 FM began playing nonstop Christmas music on November 1, Cincinnati radio station 94.9 FM started doing so on November 18, and New York City’s 102.7 FM and Philadelphia’s B101 also began doing so around that date. The earliest non-satellite radio airing of Christmas music may have been Fort Wayne, Indiana’s 95.1 FM, which began playing all Christmas music in July amid the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020.^[3]

7 Wearing Ugly Christmas Sweaters

Wearing ugly Christmas sweaters—such as ones designed with excessive amounts of glitter or pompoms or of Santa doing something highly out of character—appears to have begun in the early 2000s. Less glitzy versions of the apparel were popular in the 1950s and 1980s.

The current creators of ugly Christmas sweaters include fast food chains and creameries. In recent years, some companies have hosted or will host Ugly Christmas Sweater Parties, and at least a few ugly Christmas sweater parties have supported or will support a nonprofit organization.^[4]

6 Shopping on Cyber Monday

In the early 2000s, the National Retail Federation discovered that online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving were higher than the days leading up to it. Thus, it decided to come up with a catchy name for the day. After discarding ideas such as Blue Monday or Black Monday, Cyber Monday was created in 2005.

The federation attributed the increase in online sales on Cyber Monday to shoppers using (presumably faster) work computers to buy the items on their lists. Using a work computer also made it more likely the gift recipient would not know what they were getting.

In recent years, Cyber Monday sales have almost always increased from one year to the next. For instance, in 2019, such sales totaled $7.4 billion. By 2024, that amount had risen to $13.3 billion. Every year in between, sales had increased except in 2022, when sales dropped to $9.12 billion from $9.53 billion the year before.^[5]

5 Showings of A Christmas Story for 24 Hours Straight

The wheels for this tradition were set into motion when the 1983 movie first aired on TBS, TNT, and TCM in 1991. Those three channels aired the movie six times from the day before Christmas until the day after that holiday Christmas in 1995. The number of airings among those same three channels increased to eight in 1996.

Then, in 1997, the 24-hour marathon began, but only on TNT. In 2004, when that network changed the formatting of its programming to drama, TBS took over marathon hosting duties, but since 2014, both have aired the day-long movie marathon.

In 2020, 32 million people viewed the movie at some point during the marathon. When asked to comment on the movie’s popularity more than a decade after its release, director Bob Clark noted the movie’s approach to an extraordinary time of the year with compassion and candor, and star Peter Billingsley (who played Ralphie) noted how many of the movie’s fans tell him they see their own life story in the movie’s plot. Recently, other Christmas favored have also jumped on the 24-hour move marathon bandwagon, most notably Elf and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.^[6]

4 Leaving Milk and Cookies for Santa

Families providing Santa Claus with milk and cookies in between dropping off presents in their homes began during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The hope was that by doing so, children would comprehend how important it was to give presents to others and also appreciate the presents they themselves had received.

One report indicates that Santa Claus likes all kinds of cookies, such as peanut butter, snickerdoodles, gingerbread, sugar, oatmeal raisin, and chocolate chip. There is no word on what type of milk—2%, oat, soy, etc.—he likes.

With so many food and drink options these days, it can be hard to determine how many calories Santa Claus consumes during his yearly gift-giving trip to people’s homes around the globe. One report’s conservative estimate of about several hundred calories per home concludes he would likely exceed recommended daily calorie allowances by several hundred thousand-fold, which is not something that can likely be worked off with all those trips up and down chimneys.^[7]

3 Watching Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas Spectacular

The holiday-themed show that counts Vincente Minnelli among its creators premiered in the world’s largest indoor theater in 1933. The show still conducts the majority of its performances there and has, from its inception, included the dancing troupe known as the Rockettes and a nativity scene.

Over the years, the show has added modern features such as an LED light board and 3D effects. Annually, it uses about 1,200 costumes, some 30,000 red dots to give the Rockettes’ cheeks a rosy look, and slightly less than 14,100 batteries.^[8]

2 Paying Homage to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Santa Claus’s reindeer with a nose that appeared to glow was created in 1939 by Chicago-based department store catalog writer Robert L. May as part of a children’s book-writing assignment. May had toyed with naming his creation Rollo, Rodney, Roland, Roderick, or Reggy before settling on Rudolph.

Some of the emotions May experienced in his own life—such as isolation from bypassing a few grades in school, resulting in him being smaller and younger than his classmates, sadness from his wife’s fatal illness, and failure from his inability to become a successful novel writer—an be seen in Rudolph when the reindeer experiences feelings of isolation and glumness.^[9]

1 Reenacting Colonial Troops Delaware River Crossing

Each year for more than 70 years, hundreds of volunteers have gathered on Christmas Day along the Delaware River north of Philadelphia carrying weaponry and dressed in uniforms similar to those that George Washington’s army wore in 1776 when it launched a surprise attack on the Hessians during the Revolutionary War. Then, just as those troops did so that year, these volunteers cross the river into New Jersey.

The day’s events also include 1770s-themed activities and speeches that still occur even if the weather or river is not conducive to the river crossing reenactment. Spectators of the crossing and other events number in the thousands and come from around the United States and the world.^[10]

A variety of traditions have developed over the centuries since Christmas was first celebrated. Although many are familiar, a few relatively new ones have appeared, and some of the older, more conventional ones have been given twists that make them fresh and, often, surprising. The 10 twists to Christmas traditions new and old on this list are certainly unusual and intriguing.

See Also: 10 Strange Christmas Traditions From The Victorian Era

10 Electric (Eel) Christmas Lights

In Chattanooga, Tennessee, Miguel Wattson doesn’t sing for his supper. Not exactly. Instead, he generates electricity that illuminates the lights on the Christmas tree outside his tank at the Tennessee Aquarium.

The eel generates electricity when he’s searching for food. The low-voltage charges are transferred to the lights, which blink and flash. When he’s eating or otherwise excited, Miguel generates higher voltage, causing the lights to flash brighter and longer.

Kevin Liska, the director of Tennessee Tech University’s iCube center, which contributed the coding for the system that translates Miguel’s shocks into “a voice” that lets the eel shout “SHAZAM!” and “ka-BLAMEROO!,” explained that “electrical engineering” and “emerging business communication” were combined to produce these effects.

Using similar equipment, Miguel also tweets (mostly “sound effects”) to his nearly 41,000 Twitter followers. With a little help from his human friends, he also responds to his followers’ comments. His Twitter page shows just how much he enjoys puns, such as “r-eel-y cool” and “I’m eel-ated.”

9 Edison Christmas Lights

An early advertisement for “Christmas Lighting,” courtesy of Edison Miniature Lamps, touted the lights as safe, clean, and odor-free. They represented “no danger, smoke or smell.” The lamps could be rented or purchased, but they did have one limitation: they could “be used only in houses having electric lights.”

The lamps were invented by Thomas Edison himself. The first strand was exhibited in 1882, on an “indoor tree” in the New York City home of Edward Johnson, Edison Electric Company’s vice-president, and consisted of eighty “red, white, and blue electric colored bulbs.”

8 Metallic (and Plastic) Tinsel

Tinsel has been around since 1610. First used to decorate Christmas trees in Germany, the decorative strips were originally made of silver strands, which reflected the flames of the candles, the trees’ only light source at the time. Admirers of this new decoration regarded the tinsel as suggestive of the Nativity’s star-studded sky.

However, since silver soon tarnishes, it was replaced by other lustrous metals, including, at the beginning of the twentieth century, aluminum, and, later, lead foil, neither of which tarnish and both of which are cheaper than silver.

In 1972, when exposure to lead became a health concern, tinsel manufacturers and importers agreed to stop making and supplying lead tinsel. Since then, tinsel has been made of “plastic film coated with a metallic finish or . . . Mylar film . . . cut into thin strips.”

7 Rockefeller Christmas Tree Topper

Topping off the huge 2018 Christmas tree in New York City’s Rockefeller Center was a gargantuan task, but BorgDesign Inc. was up to the challenge. The company makes custom parts and machines, including “everything from medical equipment to radars,” for its clients.

Although Orion RED, architect Daniel Libeskind, and Swarovski, a European glass manufacturer, collaborated in creating the star, BorgDesign constructed its “core.” The project took roughly seven months, or between 500 and 1,000 hours. “We started working on it, I want to say, in April,” Andrew Borg, the company’s president, explained. “We delivered most of the parts in early October, and we delivered the lifting mechanism right at the end of October.”

The lifting mechanism had a big job to do: the star measured nine feet, four inches in height, bore seventy modules composed mostly of LED lights, and featured three million Swarovski crystals, which supplied the topper’s “distinct holiday twinkle.”

6 Inverted Christmas Tree

To stand out, something needs to be as different as an upside-down Christmas tree. Judging by Instagram, such trees were all the rage in 2017, in both shopping malls and family homes across the United States. After setting the tree in place in a modified stand or suspending the base of the tree from the ceiling, with its tip pointing down, employees or family members decorated the fir or pine, hanging ornaments from its inverted branches and piling presents under the treetop.

Inverted Christmas trees didn’t first become popular a couple of years ago, though. Holiday trees were first turned upside-down during the Middle Ages to symbolize the Trinity and the crucifixion of Christ.

5Head Ornament

Thanks to 3-D printers, your head, or anyone else’s, can become a Christmas tree ornament. Among more traditional decorations, such as balls and bells, angels and snowmen, and ribbons and bows, your own head, perhaps wearing a red stocking cap with a white pompom, can hang by a ribbon or a hook from a branch of your Christmas tree, facial hair and face (but not blood) included.

Sony Xperia came up with this rather eerie idea, using it in a 2017 promotion called Bauble Me. Sony employees showed off the printing process and its final product at “pop-up events” in the United Kingdom, during which, each day, the faces of a hundred shoppers with Xperia smartphones could be “scanned and made into a Christmas ornament,” free of charge.

4 La Befana

Since the eighth century, Italian tradition has included a witch by the name of La Befana. Following the star to Bethlehem, the Magi spent a night in the witch’s home. In the morning, having enjoyed her hospitality, the Wise men invited her to join them on their journey, but she declined, saying she had to stay home to clean house.

After their departure, though, she changed her mind and set out on her own, a basket of gifts for the baby Jesus in hand, and followed the star the Wise Men had mentioned. On January 6, the Day of the Epiphany, the Magi found the site they sought, but Le Befana was unable to do so.

Ever since, on the Eve of the Epiphany, she sets forth again, seeking the child in every house she passes and offering treats to good children and lumps of coal to naughty ones. Some of the incidents of her story appear, altered, in the story of Santa’s travels on Christmas Eve.

3 Chimney Entrances

There’s a reason that, when Santa opts to gain unlawful entry into millions of homes on Christmas Eve, he enters by way of the chimneys. Washington Irving, the early American storyteller who gave us the Headless Horseman, among other things, is responsible for the modern portrayal of Santa, describing Saint Nicholas in his 1809 book Knickerbocker’s History of New York, as a man “riding jollily among the tree tops, or over the roofs of the houses, now and then drawing forth magnificent presents from his breeches pockets, and dropping them down the chimneys of his favorites.”

His use of chimneys is derived from the belief, during the Middle Ages, that witches made their way into houses through chimneys and windows. Consequently, chimneys, in particular, became known as portals between the earthly and the otherworldly realms and were used by such magical beings as Scottish brownies, Irish bodachs, and the Italian Le Befana, a witch who rode a broomstick to deliver goodies to good children. In his description of St. Nicholas, Irving drew on this long tradition, having his character also make use of houses’ chimneys, and, in 1882, Clement C. Moore further popularized the notion that Santa entered homes through chimneys in his poem “The Night Before Christmas.”

2 NORAD Tracks Santa Program

In the United States, even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has gotten into the spirit of the Christmas holiday.

On Christmas Eve, 1955, a child called Air Force Colonel Harry Shoup at the forerunner to NORAD, then known as the Continental Air Defense Command Operations Center (CADCOC) in Colorado, to inquire into Santa’s “whereabouts.” Thanks to a misprint, the youngster had found the telephone number in a local newspaper. The colonel assured the youth that CADCOC would protect Santa. Calls from other children kept coming all night, as Shoup’s operator updated Santa’s current location.

When it was organized in 1958, NORAD inherited the tradition that developed from these calls. A massive undertaking, tracking Santa begins in November and involves seventy “government and nongovernment contributors” and over 1,500 volunteers who field callers’ questions. In 2019, the NORAD Tracks Santa program “received 126,103 calls and answered 2,030 emails, and OnStar received 7,477 requests to locate Santa.”

1Letter Adoption

The United States Postal Service (USPS) receives hundreds of thousands of letters that children have addressed to Santa. As a response to these letters, the USPS started Operation Santa. Now in its 107th year, the operation includes fifteen cities.

To protect letter writers’ privacy, their last names and all other “personal information,” including their addresses and other “points of contact,” are redacted, and gifts are matched to their intended recipients by a code. Only letters addressed to Santa Claus, 123 Elf Road, North Pole 88888 are processed through Operation Santa; others addressed to Santa go through regular channels for improperly or incompletely addressed correspondence.

Rather than destroying the letters, the Postal Service asks for volunteers who are willing to adopt a letter. Participants pore over the letters, each volunteer selecting one to adopt. Then, acting anonymously, each participant buys at least one of the requested items on the child’s list, packages it, and mails it to the child he or she has selected.

Letters are also posted on the USPS website. By registering, volunteers receive children’s letters to Santa, which the USPS redirects to them, and they then buy the children gifts, mailing them to the recipients by December 20.

About The Author: Gary L. Pullman, the author of the Western trilogy An Adventure of the Old West, featuring bounty hunter (and then sheriff) Bane Messenger, is available on Amazon. Gary lives in southern Nevada, near Area 51, which, according to his friends, “explains a lot.”

Why do people get tattoos?

Because of traditions and some cultural milestones? For personal fulfillment and a sense of identity? But why are tattoos so fascinating? Is it the tools used to make these markings or the stories that lie beneath the surface of the ink?

This list compiles a diverse group of tattoo pieces, traditions, and stories that are both interesting and answer some of these questions.

10 Olive Oatman And The Mojave Tribe

Native Americans have extensive cultural traditions that involve tattooing, but each group has different customs. In the past, several factors affected their tattooing, such as the location of the group, the natural resources to which they had access, and the religion and creation stories in which they believed.

A specific example is the Mojave tribe, which was known at least as far back as the 16th century by the Spanish. Located mainly in California and Arizona along the Colorado River, the tribe used ink from the blue cactus plant to tattoo adolescents as a rite of passage. The Mojave also got tattoos for luck and protection when heading into battle and for religious ceremonies.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many pictures of the Mojave people available today. However, a set of famous pictures of Olive Oatman shows her Mojave chin tattoos. Her story is unorthodox because Oatman wasn’t a Mojave person. She was white.^[1]

When Olive was a child, a group of Native Americans, thought to be the Tolkepayas/Western Yavapai, killed her family. Olive and her sister Mary Ann were taken captive by the group as slaves. Only their brother Lorenzo survived the attack as a free person, though he was badly injured.

The girls were frequently mistreated by their captors until they were traded to a Mojave group in California a year later. Tribal leader Espianola and his family adopted the girls. Espianola’s wife, Aespaneo, and daughter Topeka gave the Oatman girls land to farm.

The Mojave gave both girls blue cactus tattoos on their chins, a tradition in their group to ensure a good afterlife. The girls lived with the tribe for several years until Mary Ann tragically died of starvation during a drought that killed several other Mojave people.

Olive left after the US Army bribed and then threatened the Mojave people. Reunited with Lorenzo, Olive would speak often of her time with the Mojave. Although she was positive in the beginning, her opinion of them appeared to sour as time went on. How she truly felt about her time with the Mojave remains a mystery.

9 Dulong Tattoos

The Dulong people are a minority in China who lived in an inaccessible area in the Yunnan Province until a highway was built in late 1999. It was a tradition for girls to get a face tattoo when they began puberty, a tradition called “Hua Lian” (“painting the face”) or “Wen Mian” (“tattooing the face”).

The tattoos were first drawn with soot and water by an elder and then stabbed into the skin using a needle or sharpened stick. When the drawing was finished, they would rub some soot or grass juice into the wound to turn the resulting scars blue.

In the areas along the upper and middle reaches of the Dulong River, the tattoos were a complex pattern of connecting diamonds down the bridge of the nose and across the cheeks and mouth. In the lower reaches, the designs were much simpler. All tattoos were butterfly shaped as they believed that the dead turned into butterflies when they passed.

The reasons for these tattoos vary, although several sources claim that the tattoos were supposed to make their women less attractive to Lisu and Tibetan slavers. Tibetan landlords demanded that the Dulong women be taken as slaves if their families could not pay their taxes.^[2]

In passive defiance, Dulong women carved and dyed their faces black and blue with soot. The girls made sure that their markings couldn’t be washed away in the hopes of making themselves less attractive, even frightening, to foreigners.

The practice became a cultural tradition until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Fewer than 30 women with traditional Dulong tattoos are still alive today.

8 R.H. Macy

As a young man of 15 years, Rowland Hussey Macy became a sailor on Emily Morgan, a whaling ship, in the early 19th century. During his four years as a whaler, Macy got a red star tattooed on his forearm. This symbolized the stars that guided him on those cold nights at sea.

When Macy returned home, he opened a string of failed stores and then went to work for his brother-in-law’s shop in Boston. Afterward, Macy did a brief stint searching for gold in the California Gold Rush of 1849.

Once again, Macy experienced bitter failure. But he never truly gave up his dreams of opening a successful shop. So Macy opened another dry goods store in Haverhill with his brother and, for the first time, had some success with the business.

This inspired Macy to finally move to New York in 1858 to open R.H. Macy & Co. The first day only brought in a modest $11.06. By the end of the year, the store earned $85,000. R.H. Macy & Co expanded into 11 buildings and became a department store. Its logo became R.H. Macy’s red star tattoo.^[3]

7 William Lithgow

William Lithgow was a Scotsman who traveled the world and documented his adventures in several literary works in the 17th century. During a visit to Jerusalem, he and some companions got their pilgrimage tattoos. Lithgow’s tattoo was a quote professing his pride and loyalty to his homeland’s monarchy. He wrote of the tattoo:

In the last night of my staying at Jerusalem, which was at the holy grave, I remembring that bounden duty, & loving zeale, which I owe unto my native Prince; whom I in all humility (next and immediate to Christ Jesus) acknowledge to be the supreme head, and Governour of the true Christian and Catholicke Church; by the remembrance of this obligation I say, I caused one Elias Bethleete, a Christian inhabitour of Bethleem, to ingrave on the flesh of my right arme, The never-conquered Crowne of Scotland, and the now inconquerable Crowne of England, joyned also to it, with this inscription, painefully carved in letters, within the circle of the Crowne, Vivat Jacobus Rex.

At the time, most pilgrimage tattoos contained solely Christian emblems and quotations. Lithgow got other pilgrimage tattoos, but they were only mentioned in annotations.

In his biographies, he has frequently been referred to as a spy. During one of his adventures in Spain in 1620, he was captured and tortured for giving crucial information to an English ship. Trying to get a confession from Lithgow, Spanish inquisitors cut his tattoo and a sizable amount of flesh from his arm.

His account of the event was this: “The Corrigidor . . . gave direction, to teare a sunder, the name, and Crowne (as hee sayd) of that Hereticke King, and arch-enemy to the Holy Catholicke Church . . . cutting the Crowne, sinewes and flesh to the bare bones.”^[4]

Lithgow never fully recovered and narrowly avoided being burned at the stake. Later, he returned to Britain.

6 Otzi The Iceman

Otzi is a mummy that was naturally preserved in the Otztal Alps over 5,000 years ago. He was found by two German tourists in 1991. Otzi is so well-preserved that anthropologists can still see his tattoos, of which 61 have been identified.

Scientists have speculated on everything from Otzi’s cause of death and illness to his modern relatives and his diet. They also have theories about his tattoos. For example, they were probably done by first pricking the pattern using some kind of needle or stick and then rubbing soot over the skin.

Given how dark Otzi’s skin is, some of his tattoos are difficult to see with the naked eye. Several were discovered using a noninvasive multispectral imaging technique to separate each color wavelength on Otzi’s skin.

Anthropologists have speculated that many of Otzi’s tattoos were an archaic form of acupuncture that was done for therapeutic reasons. Many were located where he had physical damage—such as his Achilles tendon, lower back, wrist, and ankles.

If so, it would mean that acupuncture was developed nearly 2,000 years earlier than previously thought. Even so, researchers said:

Of course, we can’t be absolutely sure why these tattoos were placed in those locations. It’s possible Otzi’s people believed those regions of the body were spiritually significant. Still, it’s very possible that this was an early effort at acupuncture.

For example, the tattoos of Otzi’s chest are not placed over any recognizable ailment or injury. The true purpose of his tattoos are still unclear. But whether they were decorative or therapeutic, they open a window into Otzi’s culture and heritage that we never would have witnessed otherwise.^[5]

5 Mai

Mai was born on Raiatea, an island in French Polynesia. He fled to Tahiti during an invasion of Raiatea by Borbora warriors in the 1700s. Captain Wallis and his crew on the HMS Dolphin were the first Europeans to “discover” Tahiti around 1767. They tried to claim the island for Britain and crush the resistance of the natives who fought against the invasion.

As time went on, more European ships arrived and the islanders suffered from the restricted food supply and conflict with the colonizers. Some islanders were taken as “specimens” back to England but perished during the journey.

When Captain Cook returned in 1773, Mai (mistakenly called Omai by the British) asked to accompany them back to Europe so that he could obtain guns and other weaponry to fight back against the men of Borabora and reclaim Raiatea.

Mai was paraded around the country by another English man, Sir Joseph Banks. Mai met many high-society members including King George III. Before Mai returned with Captain Cook to Tahiti in 1776, he had his portrait done by the famed painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Portrait of Omai has a shoeless Mai clad in white robes with his tattooed hands outstretched to draw the attention of the viewer. Mai’s tattoos were a series of dots over the back of his hands and around his wrists.

His tattoos displayed his foreignness to the European public. At the time, he was the perfect representation of the European ideal of the “noble savage” who was seen as less than human.^[6]

4 People Of The Arctic And The Inuit

It was speculated that people of the Arctic took part in a string of similar tattooing traditions after an ivory mask, that may have dated back over 3,500 years, was recovered on Devon Island. The tattoos depicted on the mask are sets of parallel lines from forehead to lips to chin. Similar designs were found in several northern communities around the globe.

The Inuit traditions involving tattooing were first recorded by Sir Martin Frobisher in 1576 when he wrote:

The women are marked on the face with blewe streekes down the cheekes and round about the eies. [ . . . ] Also, some of their women race [scratch or pierce] their faces proportionally, as chinne, cheekes, and forehead, and the wristes of their hands, whereupon they lay a colour, which continueth dark azurine.^[7]

Unfortunately, the Inuit people were shamed for their facial tattoos for many decades when their communities were Christianized by missionaries. Shamans were converted to Christianity, and their cultural and religious practices were phased out. Some tattoos were also done for pain relief (like acupuncture), but the medical techniques of the Europeans rendered those practices obsolete.

Luckily, cultural tattoos in the Arctic Inuit communities are being destigmatized, albeit slowly, due to the work of people like Holly Mititquq Nordlum and Maya Sialuk Jacobsen. They are a pair of artists/tattooists who are slowly reintroducing the tattooing techniques of skin stitching and hand poking to their community through their apprenticeship programs.

3 Bert Grimm And The US Criminal Underworld

Bert Grimm was a US tattooist. He started his career after running away from home at 15 to become a sideshow tattoo artist. While on the road, Grimm met with other tattooists—such as Shorty Schultz, Percy Waters, and Long Andy Libarry—which helped to develop his technique. Eventually, Grimm operated different tattoo shops in Chicago, Las Vegas, Long Beach, and St. Louis.

Grimm was also an avid storyteller, taking time during a session to sell his brand and talk about his experiences. The eccentricities of his most famous customers are one of the many things that made Grimm so fascinating. He was rumored to have done tattoos for the famed crime couple Bonnie and Clyde, although what the tattoos looked like is unclear.

Reportedly, Grimm also tattooed Charles Arthur (“Pretty Boy”) Floyd, the US bank robber. Floyd had a “Rose of No Man’s Land” tattoo. (A song by the same name was meant to honor Red Cross nurses from World War I.)

Floyd’s tattoo was described in the scars and marks section of one of his wanted posters. Grimm claimed that he had tattooed Floyd at some unknown time at his shop in St. Louis.

Apparently, Grimm had been unaware of this until a US marshal had shown up at his shop. The marshal asked Floyd about the tattoo because he wanted one done on himself. After visiting Grimm, the marshal left with the same tattoo.

Grimm’s gift of gab helped spread his reputation as “the greatest tattoo artist in the world.” His career continued for approximately 70 years until his death in 1985.^[8]

2 Irezumi

Irezumi (“inserting ink”) is the Japanese term for tattooing, which originated in the Jomon period. Evidence of facial tattoos that were associated with established social ranks or evading evil spirits has been found from several clay figurines in tombs. The full body tattoo (horimono) is a beautiful and intricate tradition that showed off wealth, especially when tattoos were still illegal in Japan.

Tattoos became controversial in Japan mostly due to an association with criminal activity such as the Yakuza, a crime syndicate that is feared in the country. The Yakuza believe that tattoos are a sign of courage because of the pain to have them done.^[9]

Also, this negative view of tattoos may have occurred due to the rising Chinese influence in Japanese culture during the 17th century. Prisoners were given facial tattoos in China as a permanent branding to mark their criminality if the offense was severe enough. After the branding, criminals could be exiled as well.

This practice was adopted by the Japanese. Each region had a design for different crimes so that people could tell where the crime had been committed. Tattoos have been legal in Japan for decades, but the negative connotations are still present in some areas.

1 Tattooed Ladies And Circus Freaks

The public has been fascinated by the strange and unusual for centuries, so it stands to reason that someone would capitalize on that fascination at some point. “Freak shows” peaked in popularity in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

These shows spotlighted people with peculiar physical and mental conditions, such as Schlitzie (“The Last of the Aztecs”), Frank Lentini (“The Three-Legged Man”), and Joseph Merrick (“The Elephant Man”). But not every person was born with their peculiarity. Tattooed people, particularly women, enthralled audiences with fantastic and often false tales of how they got their tattoos.

George Contentenus (“The Tattooed Man”) had over 300 tattoos and claimed to be a prince raised in a Turkish harem. He said that his tattoos had come from “savage natives” of Burma who had threatened to cut him into pieces unless he covered his body in their markings.

Initially, he was so insistent about the truth of this story that he even published a book about the tale. Years later, he admitted that it was a false narrative designed to make him rich and famous.

Many tattooed ladies told fictitious stories about Native Americans giving them their tattoos. But not all their fame came from the stories they told.

Artoria Gibbons was the highest-paid tattooed lady of her time and had all her markings done by her partner, “Red” Gibbons. Artoria had an impressive following, most of whom were male, and continued performing as a tattooed lady into her eighties.^[10]

Although freak shows have died out, the fascination they had with tattoos lives on. The exhibition of tattoos in these shows helped to glorify and normalize tattooing in Western culture.

Savannah O. Skinner is a freelance writer and author from Canada, sometimes working under the pen name S.O. Skinner.

Today, many of us associate December with traditions and festivities that seem like an integral part of Christmas. However, this wasn’t always the case. In fact, before the Victorian era, Christmas was only ever really minimally celebrated in Britain and in other English-speaking countries. It wasn’t until the reign of Queen Victoria and her German husband, King Albert, that Christmas became the truly festive celebration we recognize today. Thus, it is thanks to the Victorian era that most of our beloved Christmas traditions, such as Christmas cards, gifts, and Boxing Day, are popular.

However, the Victorian era was also responsible for a few slightly odder traditions. Most of them, unfortunately (or in some cases fortunately), did not survive into today. To remember the most interesting of those that did not make the cut, we have compiled a list of the most unusual Christmas customs of yesteryear that are sure to put you in a festive spirit.

10Creepy Christmas Cards

The Victorian era is responsible for the creation of the very first Christmas card, which was designed by John Callcott Horsley, an English painter, on the request of his wealthy friend, Sir Henry Cole. Cole initially came up with the idea for a Christmas card after he realized that he was much too busy to write an individual Christmas greeting to every person among his family, friends, and colleagues. Cole was sure that a card with a festive image and a greeting would be a far quicker way to send his holiday wishes to everyone.

After its initial success among Cole’s friends, 1,000 of these new Christmas cards were printed and put for sale in 1843. However, the Christmas card was not successful at first and was even disapproved by the temperance movement, which feared that the presence of booze in several of the original card designs would encourage drunkenness.

Nevertheless, a year later, Christmas cards became wildly popular, and soon their design varied enormously thanks to the various painters that had different visions for the ideal Christmas card. Like Victorian valentines, some of these new Christmas card designs featured cherubs, flowers, and other symbols of spring and new life. Others, however, were far creepier and included strange images such as sinister clowns poking policemen with red pokers, giant killer wasps chasing children, and gambling monkeys.

9Glass Pickle

A glass pickle ornament was often hidden inside the Victorian Christmas tree for good luck. On Christmas day, the founder of the glass pickle was either given a special gift or allowed to open their present first.

It is said that the tradition of the glass pickle originated from a medieval story of two Spanish boys traveling home for Christmas. On their way home, tired and weary from traveling, the children stopped at an inn for a good night’s sleep. However, the innkeeper was an evil man—he stole the boys’ possessions and stuffed them into a pickle barrel. Luckily for the boys, St. Nicholas stopped by the inn and saved them. The boys then thanked St. Nicholas for saving their lives and continued on to their family.

There exists a second version of the story, which differs slightly from the first. In this version, three Spanish boys are kidnapped by an evil shopkeeper who chops them up with an axe and pickles them in a barrel. Upon hearing about the poor boys’ faith, St. Nicholas prays to God, and because of the purity of his faith, he succeeds in restoring the lives and bodies of the boys.

8Wassail Punch

Wassail punch was a popular winter drink made from a mixture of fruit, cider, and spices. Victorians served it to carolers who went from house to house wassailing or singing Christmas carols and hymns. After all the carols were sung, the carolers were invited to the houses of Victorian families to share a sip of wassail from the communal wassail bowl. This tradition of inviting carolers for a sip of wassail was borrowed from the Elizabethan era.

The recipes for Wassail punch varied from family to family, but it was important that the punch be hot. Families with old-fashioned taste based their wassail punch on ale or cider, which was heated until it became thick and foamy. Often, the foam that formed on top of the ale or cider was called “lamb’s wool.” Fresh nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, lemon slices, and roasted crab apples were frequently added to enhance the flavor of the punch.

7Festive Science

During the Victorian era, the celebration of scientific progress became almost synonymous with the word Christmas. Christmas books often contained experiments for children, news magazines published scientific Christmas stories, and poems and newspapers advertised scientific Christmas gifts and scientific leisure activities.

In the 1830s, two galleries of practical science, The Adelaide Gallery and The Royal Polytechnic Institution, opened their doors to the public. The Adelaide Gallery held various Christmas performances, including festive oratorios that often featured projections of microscopic organisms and other scientific displays. The Royal Polytechnic Institution soon surpassed it in popularity largely due to John Henry Pepper’s contribution toward festive science at the Polytechnic.

A scientist and inventor, Pepper turned the Polytechnic into a winter fairy tale. Optical pantomimes and a huge Christmas tree surrounded by stacks of scientific Christmas gifts were a huge hit, but the most popular attraction of all was the ghost. Pepper’s ghost was an illusion of a ghost appearing and disappearing on the stage. It was, however, not Pepper’s original invention—it was adapted from a previous design created by Henry Dircks, an English engineer, who designed but did not operate the mirror-based invention some years previously. The trick of the illusion was to project a concealed actor, who was hiding in a separate room, onto the stage. After each performance, scientists would give a thorough lecture on the science behind the magical performance and reveal the mechanisms behind it to the enthralled audience.

6Parlor Games

The Victorians were extremely fond of entertainment and parlor games, and there was no better time for that than Christmas. Parlor games were entertaining, helped pass the time, and cheered everyone up during times when there was little else to do. At times however, these games were downright dangerous and reckless. Take snapdragon, for example. During this game, a bunch of raisins were piled into a bowl with rum and then the rum was set on fire. The task was to snatch the raisins out of the bowl and eat them while they were still ablaze. Simpler games that are still played today included charades and “Change Seats!”

During the Victorian era, the loser of the game usually had to pay a forfeit, such as to kiss every lady in the room. Often, this forfeit seemed very agreeable to gentlemen, but to their disappointment, a lady frequently accompanied them around the room and did all the kissing on their behalf. Other inventive forfeits included uttering half a dozen compliments to a lady without using the letter L or making like a Grecian statue and allowing others to put your limbs into positions of their choosing.

Forfeits for ladies were similar and often included kissing as well. One such forfeit was to kiss a gentleman in a “rabbit fashion,” whereby a lady and a gentleman of her choosing both put one end of a piece of cotton in their mouths and pecked toward each other until they were kissing.

5Oysters

The type of meat served to the table by Victorians largely depended on the wealth and location of the family. While the wealthy chose beef and turkey, especially for occasions such as Christmas, the poor were not able to afford such expensive meat and instead had to settle for something less extravagant, such as geese. However, sometimes even geese were far too expensive, and in such instances, poor families had to settle for a cheaper festive dinner.

During the Victorian era, oysters were plentiful and cheap. Small oysters were often sold as fast food on the streets as well as pickled to keep for later. Bigger oysters were either put in stews and pies or eaten on their own. Oysters were also frequently consumed in public houses and went nicely with a pint of stout beer. Knowing this, it comes as no surprise that in this era, the demand for oysters, which were also known as “the poor man’s protein,” was high. For those who could not afford any other meat, it was oysters and not turkey that was most often the centerpiece of the Christmas dinner.

4Christmasing

Christmasing was a Christmas tradition whereby vendors gathered various festive branches, such as mistletoe and holly, and sold them for profit in the days before Christmas. Houses, pubs, inns, and churches were heavily decorated with these festive branches, and often, puddings and sometimes even mince pies were decorated in this way also.

Holly was more popular than mistletoe for various reasons, the most important being price. Holly cost less than half the price of mistletoe, and there was more of it. As well as that, holly can be grown in any hedge, while mistletoe grows only in the branches of specific trees, such as apple and hawthorn. Thus, mistletoe was frequently seen as the purchase of the wealthy classes or those who hosted parties. As such, it became something of a status symbol to have some in your house.

A few weeks before Christmas, street vendors often scrounged the neighborhoods of London for holly. It was a precarious trade, however, since vendors often had to trespass into private grounds and land to obtain these festive branches. If caught by the master of the house or its servants, the vendor was lucky to have only the holly taken away from him. To obtain mistletoe, vendors had to trespass orchards and often faced danger from dogs, traps, and spring guns. Thus, they scrounging for mistletoe much more rarely.

3Goose Feather Tree

The goose feather tree—a collection of goose feathers dyed green and decorated with small ornaments—was the first artificial German, and later Victorian, Christmas tree. Feathers of swans, turkeys, and ostriches were also used. These peculiar Christmas trees were first brought over to America by German immigrants who found it difficult to find fir trees in their native land due to deforestation. At the time, it was popular to chop of the tip of a fir tree and use it as a Christmas tree. However, the rest of the fir tree then became useless as it could no longer grow or provide timber. Statutes were even created to stop people from having more than one Christmas tree to prevent excess damage to fir tree populations.

It was not overly difficult to make these festive trees. All one needed was either sticks or wire and feathers. The sticks were covered with the feathers and then drilled into a larger stick to resemble branches. Often, the feathers were died green in imitation of pine needles.

2Football

During the Victorian era, and indeed right until the 1950s, football on Christmas day was a tradition important as any other. In an era when entertainment options were few, football frequently resulted in fans postponing their Christmas roast dinner to attend a match. Important matches were often played both on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. In 1888, for example, Everton played two matches on Christmas day, attracting about 2,000 people—a large crowd for the time. Their match on Boxing Day was less exciting (it was a draw) and resulted in a lower turnout (but then again, it was played in a shower of hailstones).

The very first football league match played on Christmas Day was in 1889 between Preston North End and Aston Villa. Both teams were incredibly strong, and 9,000 people came to watch the match.

When football leagues grew, fans started traveling longer distances to view Christmas Day matches. Fortunately, there was no public transport shutdown, and thus people could follow football leagues without difficulty. Later, when televised matches were introduced, this tradition was largely abandoned.

1Goose Clubs

Even though the centerpiece of a Christmas dinner in Victorian England was usually a goose, most people earned only a couple of shillings a week and were far too poor to afford it. It was easier for poor working families living in rural areas since farmers often gave a bird or a piece of meat to their workers as a Christmas bonus, and squires frequently gave meals to their tenants. However, poor families that lived in towns and cities had no such opportunities of free Christmas meals. Thus, they often joined “Goose Clubs.”

Members of this peculiar club paid a couple of pence a week into the club’s fund, which then went toward the purchase of a goose just before Christmas. This ensured that everyone, even the poorest families, could enjoy a traditional Christmas dinner. Frequently, local bakers stayed open late on Christmas day and cooked the geese for the poor.

Laura is a student from Ireland in love with books, writing, coffee, and cats.

Most of us think of traditions as warm and fuzzy customs that were passed down through the years to remind us of a simpler time as well as the love of our friends and family. Then there are the insanely brutal traditions that may have started out with good intentions but now make us wonder why anyone would engage in such barbaric rituals in the 21st century.

10 Mingi

Just as Lord Voldemort is known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” in the Harry Potter book series, mingi is the tradition that must not be named among the Kara, Hamar, and Banna tribes in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia. There are about 225,000 of these tribe members isolated in primitive villages, practicing their ancient ritual in secret.

Mingi means that a child is cursed and must be killed to protect the tribe. (Although we’ll use male pronouns, this tradition applies to both male and female children.) A child is mingi if his top teeth come in before his bottom teeth, if he breaks a tooth or injures his genitals, if he is born to unwed parents, or if his parents do not have the ceremonial blessing of the village elders to have children. Adults who don’t cooperate with these traditions are also designated as mingi and banished from the tribe.

If a child is mingi, the tribal elders will snatch that child from his parents and drown him in the river, leave him to starve or be eaten by animals, or push him off a cliff to his death. The elders may also suffocate the child by filling his mouth with soil.

These Omo Valley tribes believe that a mingi child will bring evil spirits to their village, resulting in drought, famine, and sickness for the tribe. Although no one knows the exact number, as many as 200 to 300 mingi children may be killed annually.

Even among the members of the tribe, mingi is a taboo subject. Children under 15 are never told about the ritual killing. It certainly isn’t something to be discussed with outsiders. Yet Lale Labuko, a young man from the Omo Valley who was the first of his tribe to be educated at a boarding school 105 kilometers (65 mi) away, found the courage to tell an adult outsider. Together, they’ve spearheaded efforts to save mingi children. In some cases, the government has imprisoned mingi executioners. The tradition is still practiced today—just more discreetly.

9 Pig Slaughter Festival

Each year in the small village of Nem Thuong in northern Vietnam, hundreds of people watch the ritual slaughter of two well-fed pigs to bring the village residents luck for the coming year. Always occurring on the sixth day of the first month of the lunar calendar, the Pig Slaughter Festival is held to honor Doan Thuong, a local protector deity.

According to legend, Doan Thuong was a general in the Ly Dynasty who drove invading forces off the villagers’ land. He fed his starving troops with slaughtered pigs, which is supposedly how the festival started. The pigs’ blood represents good luck in the forms of a good harvest, reproductive ability, monetary success, and good health.

As music is played, the villagers parade the live pigs around the village. Participants in the ritual lay the animals on their backs, pull their legs away from their bellies with ropes, and use swords to hack the squealing pigs in half in front of the crowd. The villagers rush to smear banknotes with the pigs’ blood so that they can place the notes on altars in their houses for good luck.

Animal rights activists have tried to convince the government to stop the festival. Although Vietnamese officials have pressured the village elders to be less publicly cruel to animals, the government has refused to ban the festival. Officials seem to be less concerned about animal cruelty and more apprehensive about the world’s opinion of their local festivals now that pictures can be disseminated over the Internet so quickly.

8 La Esperanza Rain Ceremony

Nobody likes a drought, especially farmers, so many cultures have rituals designed to bring rain. Even today, some Native Americans perform rain dances. In Takhatpur, India, the villagers conduct elaborate frog marriages to call upon their rain gods to end a drought. The frogs dress for the occasion and even kiss after they exchange vows.

But the village women of La Esperanza in Guerrero, Mexico, prefer a different approach. Each May, as the male farmers get their fields ready for planting, the women prepare a large feast of cultural foods like chicken, turkey, mole, boiled eggs, rice, and tortillas. They bring the food to a ceremonial site to share with others from the village. It’s a traditional day of offerings to their deities to ensure that the village has enough rain for the crops.

After they recite their prayers and offer food and flowers to their gods, they form a large circle and wait for people from neighboring villages to arrive. The children ready their cell phones to take pictures and videos of the festivities. And then the fun begins.

Inside the cheering human circle, the able-bodied women—young and old—find opponents from neighboring villages and beat each other to a pulp with their bare hands. Sometimes, men and children fight, too. This is a day-long blood fest for the female warriors. The goal is to make as much red liquid stream down their faces as possible. There are no winners or losers. No issues of revenge. At the end, they hug each other.

As a sacrifice to the gods, the spilled blood is collected in buckets and later ploughed into the fields where the crops are grown. The fights continue unabated until dark, when the proud and bloodied women walk home, happy that their sacrifice will help to feed the village for the next year.

7 Coconut Head Smash

In Tamil Nadu in southern India, thousands of devotees go to the Mahalakshmi temple to engage in a tradition in which they ask their gods for success and good health or offer thanks for wishes already granted. As a crowd gathers to watch, a priest smashes the head of each believer, who is seated on the ground, with a large coconut. A devotee must be at least 18 years old to participate.

The ritual takes place on the second Tuesday of the Tamil month of Aadi every year. It’s believed that the tradition started in the 19th century when the British tried to build a railroad through the village. The residents protested, so the British sarcastically offered to reroute the transportation line if the locals would break large stones with their heads. When the villagers complied, the railroad was built elsewhere.

The stones were soon replaced by coconuts as the preferred instrument to break over the devotees’ heads, but this tradition still comes with considerable risk depending on the coconut’s size and the force with which the head is whacked.

According to neurosurgery professor Anil Kumar Peethambaran in an interview with National Geographic, “What happens is . . . there is a certain amount of tolerance for the skull beyond which it will cause damage to the skull. So, if the coconut is big and if the coconut breaks, that means that a part of the energy is dissipated and the damage done is less and if the coconut doesn’t break, more damage is done to the skull.”

Dozens of people are treated for serious head injuries every year. Ironically, this good health tradition may be deadly.

6 People Trampled By Cows For Luck

A lot of cultures have rituals designed to bring them good luck. But in villages around the Ujjain area of India, the annual tradition of male residents getting trampled by their cows on Ekadashi, the day after the Hindu festival of lights known as “Diwali,” is probably one of the strangest. Stranger still, they’ve been doing this for centuries.

Cows are sacred to the Hindus in India, which may explain why the villagers claim that no one has ever been hurt in such a seemingly dangerous tradition. Before the ritual trampling, the cows are decorated with henna patterns and brightly colored baubles. As others crowd around to watch, the men lie with garlands in the street while their herds of cows literally run over them. In this way, the trampled men believe that their prayers will be answered by the Hindu gods and that they will receive good luck in the coming year.

5 Easter Rocket War

Just off the coast of Turkey, the villagers of Vrontados on the Greek island of Chios celebrate Greek Orthodox Easter a little differently than most believers in the faith. As the Sun sets on Easter Saturday, they like to pelt each other with tens of thousands of homemade bottle rockets in a traditional rocket war known as “Rouketopolemos.” The two sides in this mock war are the followers of the town’s two Orthodox churches, Agios Markos and Panagia Erithiani, who continue their battle into the wee hours of Easter morning.

Although the goal is to hit the opposing church’s bell while services are being held inside, there’s never really a winner. There can be a lot of property damage despite the protective wire mesh that covers the churches and surrounding houses. There have also been serious injuries and even deaths from the rockets.

Technically, it’s illegal to make rockets in Vrontados. The annual celebration is a big tourist attraction, so the local police usually pretend not to notice the deafening and illuminating illegal activities that have been going on around them for at least 125 years.

The origins of this battle are unclear, but there are two competing stories that the locals like to tell. In one version, cannons on local ships that were first used to battle pirates were eventually fired each Easter as part of the holiday’s celebration. When Ottoman invaders took the cannons in the late 1800s, the villagers began firing rockets on Easter instead.

A second version of the story is that the villagers wanted to celebrate the Easter services that the Turks had prohibited. The Greeks faked a war between their churches to keep the frightened Turks away while they celebrated Easter mass.

Some residents don’t like this rocket war. “We live as hostages to this tradition,” said one unnamed villager to the BBC in a 2004 interview. “We can’t breathe when it takes place, we have to be on standby in case a fire breaks out because if you are not careful you can even lose your house.”

4 Santhara

To outsiders, santhara (or sallekhana) is often confused with suicide or euthanasia. To the followers of Jainism, an ancient religion in India that focuses on spiritual discipline through a simple life that eschews physical pleasure, santhara is a religious right to worship as they choose. Every year, as many as 500 believers in Jainism starve themselves to death to liberate their souls from the cycle of death and rebirth through reincarnation. Instead, they believe this is the way to attain nirvana, the ultimate state of bliss.

Unlike Christians, who consider the body a temple of the soul, Jains see their bodies as prisons of their souls. Santhara can be a cause for celebration and pride for those left behind because the person who made the starvation oath took control of their own path to salvation.

Jains don’t see santhara as suicide, which they view as a violent act against the body, because santhara is nonviolent. It is physically painful but supposedly punctuated by moments of euphoria as the soul is transformed. Throughout the process, people near the starving person continually touch and hold that person. When it is time for the person to die, they are raised to a sitting position because divine beings in the Jain religion are never seen sleeping. They always appear in a sitting position or a half-sitting position.

Those practicing the ritual are seen by other Jain followers as living saints. Other Jains may travel from across the country to witness, endure, and be blessed by the sacrifice of the person who has taken this oath. As the person dies, the witnesses chant the names of divine beings.

Both monks and laypeople, the healthy and the dying, take the starvation oath. More women than men do it. The practice has been controversial for years among the general public. On August 10, 2015, the Rajasthan High Court in India declared santhara to be illegal. However, that ruling is being challenged in the Supreme Court as of late August 2015.

3 Costa Rica Bullfighting

Unlike bullfighting in Mexico and Spain, which usually ends with the death of the bull, Costa Rican bullfighting is a more humane tradition that elevates the status of the bull to that of a celebrity. No one can hurt the bull, although he’s free to hurt or kill anyone he chooses without reprisal. The rules may have less to do with love for the animal than with practicality. Thousands of farming families depend on cows for their livelihoods, so they don’t want their bulls killed. Even so, some animal rights activists believe that the animals are mistreated.

When a bull enters the ring in Costa Rica, an announcer introduces him by name and gives his weight and information about his background, including his father’s bullfighting history. Then the improvisados, or rodeo clowns, face him down. Most improvisados are untrained young men who either stay close to the fence for a quick getaway or foolishly taunt the bull to amuse the crowd. They try to be as daring and entertaining as possible to win cash prizes from the festival’s organizers and sponsors.

The trouble is that when these bulls get fired up, it’s almost impossible to outrun them. If you can’t get over the fence quickly enough, your best hope is that the bull becomes distracted by someone else because you’re not permitted to fight the bull. You can only run away from him, and he’s darn fast.

As shown in the video above, there are a lot of rear-end collisions, with the bull tossing the men into aerial somersaults before sometimes trampling their bodies when they land on the ground. There’s no time limit on how long you can stay in the ring with the bull. But more time is not your friend. Hundreds of improvisados are injured each year.

No one’s sure how this tradition began, but bullfighting festivals are held throughout the country each year. It’s almost a rite of passage for young Costa Rican men to enter the bullfighting ring after they turn 18. “It’s just the Tico thing to do,” said Jon Carlos Cattano, 28, to the Tico Times. “It’s important to do it at least one time in your life.”

2 Gotmar Mela

Each year for at least a century, the residents of Pandhurna and Sawargaon, two villages in India divided by the Jam River, have pelted each other with stones for one day in a festival known as Gotmar Mela. Before each battle begins, a tree trunk with a flag tied on top is stuck in the middle of the riverbed. The team that retrieves the flag first is the winner.

However, climbing the tree to grab that flag while villagers throw big rocks may be the last thing a participant ever does. Injuries number in the hundreds every year, and there have been at least 17 deaths. Government officials have tried to persuade the villagers to use rubber balls instead of stones—to no avail. An outright ban didn’t work, either, and was lifted after pressure from the villagers.

There are conflicting stories about how the festival began. In one version, a Pandhurna boy fell in love with a Sawargaon girl, but their parents forbade their marriage. The young lovers decided to elope. As the boy carried his lover across the river to Pandhurna, the Sawargaon villagers began throwing stones at him. The Pandhurna residents returned the favor from their side of the river. Eventually, everyone agreed to let the kids get married, and they throw stones at each other once a year to mark the occasion.

Another version of the legend says that the king of Pandhurna abducted the beautiful daughter of Sawargaon’s ruler about 300 years ago. When the villagers of Sawargaon realized what had happened, they began pelting stones at the Pandhurna king, who had escaped to the other side of the river by then. To protect their king, Pandhurna villagers fired stones at Sawargaon. The king made it safely to his palace, and now the grooms from each village supposedly throw stones during the annual festival to win brides from the other village.

1 Yanshui Beehive Rocket Festival

“Insane” is almost too mild a word to describe the annual Beehive Rocket Festival held in the Yanshui District of Tainan, Taiwan. The Beehive Rocket Festival is part of the Lantern Festival that celebrates the Chinese New Year. But in some ways, it’s a uniquely dangerous celebration. During the Easter Rocket War in Greece that we talked about earlier, bottle rockets are launched toward church bells. They’re not meant to hit people directly.

However, with the Yanshui Beehive Rocket Festival, bottle rockets are arranged in large beehive structures, and people willingly move toward the exploding fireworks, deliberately trying to get hit as many times as possible. The more times you’re hit, the luckier you’ll be in the coming year. The often tightly packed crowds seem to bounce up and down with the rocket blasts, which at their peak can sound like the buzzing of bees in a hive.

Most participants suit up in protective gear, including fire-resistant clothing and helmets with face masks. Some young men rely on faith to protect them, wearing only a loincloth and a towel to shield their eyes from the intense heat and flying debris. Despite the cavalier attitude of the crowd, people do get hurt and sometimes require treatment at a hospital.

The festival began as a response to a cholera epidemic that raged in the city about 200 years ago. To ward off the evil spirits that were believed to be causing the illness, residents lit a massive firework display to win the favor and protection of their god. The epidemic subsided, and the rocket festival became an annual event for good luck.

When many of us think of New Year’s traditions, noisemakers, champagne, a ball drop, counting down the minutes, and maybe a kiss comes to mind. Some people may do these things wearing adult diapers knowing rest rooms will be scant in Times Square, some people in North Carolina may be watching a live opossum drop instead of a ball, but the general jidst remains. All diapers and opossums aside, here we take a look at some of the stranger New Year’s traditions from around the world.

See Also: 10 Craziest Alternatives To New Year’s Fireworks

10 Colored Skivvies

The color of one’s drawers is a matter of great importance in a few countries on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. In Italy, it is tradition to wear red underwear during this period in order to bring good luck. This tradition is said to span back to medieval times; men would drape their groins with a red cloth to protect their twigs and berries – those “family jewels” – from witches who were roaming the village streets by midnight seeking to cast spells and cause a ruckus.

Some South American countries, such as Brazil, Mexico and Bolivia hold the belief that the coming year’s fortune is determined by the color of your underwear. For example, red brings love, white brings peace, and yellow brings wealth and luck. I wonder what this means for those who prefer to go commando.

9 Broken Plates

In Denmark, people hurl crockery at the doors of their loved ones. Old dishes are saved year round, and once the clock hits midnight, people run around their neighborhoods throwing them against the doors of their friends and families. The more broken pieces laying outside your door, the more friends you have and the better your luck will be for the year. Afterall, one man’s vandalism is another man’s fortune. Lately, it[s been acceptable for the less enthused or violent to set pre-broken pieces outside of people’s doors.

8 Stuffing Your Face With 12 Grapes

In Spain, the tradition of stuffing one’s face with grapes carries both luck and superstition. A Spaniard will rarely risk spoiling their fate in the coming year by skipping out on stuffing grapes in their mouth, one for each of the twelve strokes of midnight. Dating back to at least 1895, but being popularized and established by some vine growers to better sell huge batches from an excellent harvest, this tradition leads to twelve months of good luck and prosperity as long as you get them in there by the twelfth stroke. Just don’t choke. Oh, and something about red underwear—convention has it they wear those while stuffing the grapes in their mouths, too. But in Spain, this red underwear should have been given to you by someone else.

7 Animal whispering

A tradition dating back to old agrarian superstition, it is believed in Romania that animals get the gift of communication only on New Year’s Day. So if you happen to be there on New Year’s day, you just may spot a farmer chatting with his animals and whispering well-wishes in their ears. It is hoped, however, that the people will not understand what their animals are saying. Successful communication and deciphering what they say means bad luck. If unsuccessful, the year ahead will be a good one. Of all of these to try, one can bet I’ll try this one with my dogs New Year’s morning. Bad luck or not, I can only hope to know things like if they think their kibble is alright or if they lay on their back because they love me or they solely want their belly rubbed. I’ll toss some red underwear in.

6Sleepovers With the Dead

New Year’s Eve tradition takes the residents of Talca, Chile, to their local cemeteries for a sleepover. It is believed that their dead loved ones come back to the graveyard to celebrate the year’s end, so the town’s people join the party by making fires, bringing meals, decorating the graves and setting up their beds among the dead when they decide to call it a night. Way to add some extra spirit to the New Year. Grandma and grandpa, I love you but… no. You are always welcome to come here if you want.

5 Dropping Ice Cream

While dropping ice cream on the ground has sent countless children into a cry fest (and maybe adults), it is a New Year’s tradition in Switzerland to purposely drop their ice cream on the ground or floor as it symbolizes, and is thought to bring, overflowing abundance in the coming year. If that’s all it takes, I am heading to the store for some Ben and Jerry’s stat.

4 Lugging Suitcases

Who doesn’t want a year full of travel and adventure? Apparently Colombians want it bad enough that they have an entire midnight tradition on New Year’s surrounding this desire. As the clock strikes 12, they grab their suitcases and run around the block as fast as they can. If they do this in the right spirit, they are guaranteed to travel during the coming year. Sign me up for this obvious cosmo science—this wanderluster has waited a lifetime for this.

3 Talc Smearing

The new year in Thailand comes in April and is celebrated by going around pouring water and smearing talcum powder on random people. The water is a way of showing people respect and to symbolize a cleansing. In some areas, the water is mixed with flowers and traditional perfumes before spraying people. The talc is considered a blessing for the year ahead. This celebration is referred to as Songkran, which comes from the Sanskrit word “samkranti,” which means “astrological passage,” transformation and change. I’m down for getting messy, but can I trade in that talc blessing for some mulah?

2 Scarecrow Burning

When midnight strikes in Ecuador, people light scarecrows decked with the faces of pop culture figures, politicians and various other icons on fire. Symbolic of cleansing the bad from the previous year, this tradition of effigy burning is said to date back to an 1895 yellow fever epidemic, when people packed coffins with the clothing of the dead and set them on fire as a symbol of purification. A pyro’s dream arsony party. For extra luck, try jumping over the burning effigy twelve times without becoming a part of it.

1 Fist Fighting

How about wiping the slate clean for the new year with a brawl? In Peru, this festival to settle old grievances, Takanakuy, translates to “when the blood is boiling.” These celebrations include brightly colored costumes, eating, drinking, music, dancing, and, you know, the usual – gathering around arenas to watch members of the community fight each other. A tradition that includes all ages and genders, the festival is held in hopes of creating stronger bonds within the communities, solving conflict, and hopefully arriving at a greater peace, wiping the slate clean for the coming year. I personally will be hugging it out.

About The Author: Jackie Haze currently is an MFA candidate living in New Orleans with her two chihuahuas, Bacchus and Lola. She has a smattering of publications, including memoirmixtapes, Via Nola Vie, Curve, and Happy Cow.

That last of the ancient Olympic Games was held more than 1,600 years ago. For one final time, the strongest and quickest men locked into a ferocious competition to find the greatest athlete in the world. Sure, we brought the Olympics back by name in 1896, but it wasn’t the same. Much has changed, and a lot of traditions the ancient Greeks enjoyed didn’t get carried over to the Olympics we watch today.

10The Ritual Sacrifice Of Animals

The Olympics began with the athletes entering a temple. There, they stood before an imposing statue of Zeus brandishing his thunderbolts. A sliced piece of a boar flesh would be put before them, and they would have to swear an oath to the gods over it, promising to obey the rules of the games.

It was a strange way to start, but it was nothing compared what was to come. The real highlight came on day three, when a procession of 100 bulls were marched to the Great Altar of Zeus and ritually slaughtered by priests before a crowd. Some of the meat would get eaten, but the animals’ thighs would be burned to a crisp as a sacrifice to the gods.

9Eating Sheep Testicles As A Performance-Enhancer

The Greeks viewed testicles as a performance-enhancing drug. From watching eunuchs and castrated animals, they’d figured out that there was some kind of connection between testicles and manliness. They didn’t quite understand the biology, but they knew there was a link, and they were pretty sure the best way to become manly was to eat as many testicles as possible.

Of course, there were alternatives. Some would get ready by eating a ground-up mix of donkey hooves and rose petals. Others would eat live bees.

A few took a dirtier route. They would try to place curses on their opponents, which the Greeks were pretty sure really worked. There are stories from the Olympics that tell of athletes veering off course or not making it to the starting block, mistakes the Greeks chalked up to magical hexes.

8Athletes Competing In The Nude

We’re not entirely sure why the Greeks insisted on letting it all hang loose. According to one legend, it all started when a runner tripped on his loincloth and decided to say to hell with clothes. Others think that the Greeks took competing naked as a matter of pride, believing that only a barbarian would try to hide his nakedness. Either way, they didn’t just go naked, they made a show out of it. They would lather themselves up with olive oil and parade around the stadium showing off.

The people loved it. Some even wrote poems about it. We have one from a poet named Bacchylides, who was trying to describe an athlete throwing a discus. He got so caught up in the moment, though, that he threw in, “In such a way, amid the vast, circling crowd of the Greeks, did he display his wondrous body.”

7The Thong That Just Covers The Tip

They were almost entirely naked, anyway. Some athletes indulged in one little allowance: the kynodesme. This was something sort of like a jockstrap or a thong, except that it covered nothing but the tip of the penis. It would be tied around the athlete’s waist, with a tiny little bow around the penis as a decorative flourish.

This wasn’t out of modesty—in fact, it didn’t even cover up your genitals. All it covered was the foreskin, which, to the Greeks, was an incredibly valuable body part. They viewed long, draping foreskins as the epitome of handsomeness. Greek art is full of men with absurdly long foreskins. They show up so often that historians aren’t even sure if these are paintings of an ideal man or if that’s just really what ancient Greek genitals looked like.

Sometimes, the kynodesme had an aesthetic value. Some were elongated to make the foreskin look bigger than it really was. It was such a popular look that some people wore them at home instead of just at the games.

6Mass Prostitution

Prostitutes and parties were huge parts of the Olympic games. Women from all over the Mediterranean would travel out to the Olympics to sell their bodies. In the five days of the games, a prostitute could make as much money as she made throughout the whole year.

Some of these women made ends meet by working as weavers during the day. So, when you walked down the streets during the day, the prostitutes would be out on the streets weaving. They would be half-naked, weaving clothing as saucily as it’s possible to weave clothes, hoping to lure in another client.

People threw drunken parties that devolved into orgies and went on until dawn. Some wouldn’t sleep throughout the whole games, and hardly anyone would take a bath. By the end, the city probably stunk like a cross between a gym and a brothel because that’s pretty much exactly what it was.

5Pankration, The Mixed-Martial Arts Sport With No Rules

The Greeks had a sport called Pankration that was sort of like our modern mixed martial arts. Two men would lock into combat, free to use whatever fighting style they wanted until one submitted. Other than bites, eye-gouges and beating the genitals, everything was allowed.

Pankration competitors could do almost anything, and they did everything. Some of the moves they used were incredibly brutal. One fighter, Sostratos of Sikyon, earned the nickname “Mr. Fingertips” because he liked to start matches by breaking his opponents’ fingers. Another fighter, Arrhachion, literally killed himself trying to win. While he was being strangled between a pair of thighs, Arrhachion dislocated his opponent’s toe. His opponent gave in, and Arrhachion died from suffocation, becoming the first Olympian to win while dead.

4Chariot Races That Killed People

The chariot races were incredibly deadly. There would usually be about 40 chariots on the tracks, and as they turned, their wheels would lock together. Some would go flying off-course and crash, while others would go flying right into the audience. In one case, a race started with 21 chariots, but by the time it ended, only one was left standing.

The sport claimed countless lives, usually in front of a cheering crowd. That may well be why the wealthy people who owned the chariots typically didn’t ride them. Instead, they would hire other people to ride in the chariot race for them and could still win an Olympic wreath for paying someone else to risk his life.

3The Race In 70 Pounds Of Armor

The last foot race of the Olympics would be the Hoplitodromos, and it was crazy. The competitors would come to the starting line with a helmet on their heads, metal greaves on their shins, and a shield in their hands. They carried 50–70 pounds of armor with them, and they’d be expected to run in it.

They wore nothing else. This was the Olympics. They couldn’t wear clothes. They were just naked people in helmets and shin guards.

The Olympians would have to run 400 meters as quickly as they could with all this armor weighing them down. We’ve tried to recreate it with modern athletes, and it was disastrous. No one could keep their shield up after 70 meters, and they were staggering and struggling to move after 275 meters.

2Not Letting Women Enter, Even If They’re Competing

Virgin girls could watch the Olympics. They were encouraged, in fact, because they’d try to hook up with the athletes. Adult women, though, couldn’t. With the sole exception of the Priestess of Demeter Chamyne, who would watch over the Olympics atop an ivory altar, women couldn’t get in no matter what.

That including women who were competing. A Spartan woman named Cynisca entered a chariot team into the Olympics. She funded and trained them, but she wasn’t allowed riding them. She was forced to hire men to ride her horses for her and wasn’t even allowed to watch them go around.

She won—twice. She even had a monument made in her honor inside the Olympic stadium. Being a woman, though, she wasn’t allowed to watch them unveil it, and she was never permitted to walk in and see it.

1 Demolishing The Winner’s City Walls

The winners were treated like gods. On the final day of the Olympics, they received wreaths from a wild olive tree. Statues were built in their honor. Songs and poems were written for them. They were paraded home in a chariot, given heaps of money and assured that they would never have to pay taxes again.

Some cities, though, thought all that wasn’t going far enough. Their winners deserved a little more. A city with strong men, the Greeks believed, needed no walls to defend itself. And so, when their athletes came home, they tore down a whole section of their walls and let the winning Olympians march over the rubble.

Since the dawn of time, human beings have been obsessed with death, dying, and our ultimate fate in this mortal coil that we know will be our destiny. We know we’re going to die, and that sets the stage for some deep, existential questions about the meaning of life. One of the outgrowths of this is our morbid fascination with death. It is because of this that we’ve been practicing funerary rites and death parades since time immemorial.

The Danse Macabre, French for “Dance of Death,” is an artistic and literary movement that celebrated the universality of death.^[1] Emerging as the Black Death ravaged Europe, it influenced plenty of art and culture that came after it, from classical ensembles to the modern-day New Orleans jazz funerals. From Willie Stokes Jr., a man who had a casket made to look like a Cadillac, complete with blinking headlights, to more common things like cremation, humans have been extremely inventive when it comes to how they’re going to pay their respects to the dead.

10 Prehistoric Burials

Before we get around to the caskets, rituals, dances, and mortuaries we’re familiar with today, we need to look at the practice of burying the dead throughout human history. Humans have been doing so in elaborate ways for a very, very long time, with the first burials that we know about dating as far back as 100,000 years ago.

Qafzeh Cave in Israel is one of the oldest burial sites we’ve found, dating back to the Middle Paleolithic period of human history.^[2] Featuring the bodies of at least 27 Paleolithic individuals as well as several animals dating from different periods, this grave site was unmistakably intentional because of one prominent feature: decorations. The decorations of the skulls and other body parts were done with red ocher, and other instruments of decor were observed at the site. Two of the skeletons are almost entirely intact. The skulls had been painted with red ocher, which was most probably done as part of a religious funeral rite of some sort.

9 Tomb Of The Mutilated

These rudimentary and archaic grave designs set the stage for what would become the modern caskets of all types we find around the world today. The bodies found at the Qafzeh Cave burial site also had some other unmistakable features, most notably that all of them seemed to be the victims of violence of some sort. The Paleolithic was a rough time, between intertribal violence, familial rivalries, and the difficulty in securing food without being killed by an angry wild animal, and they seemed to have taken the funeral rites (which happened often) very seriously. Shells were found, along with a set of deer antlers, snail shells, and other such objects which were obviously used to decorate this mass grave.^[3]

This set the stage for another invention that would come many, many years later: the tomb. While the mass graves of prehistory were definitely decorated, they were just the basic forerunners to what would be the tomb, which is an actual structure built around the bodies, typically of families or other tight bands of people. A tomb is a built or excavated encasement, which separates it from mass graves.

One of the oldest-known tombs comes from the Neolithic period, about 6,000 years ago, and was discovered in modern-day Spain. Experiments and DNA analyses of this site have uncovered that these bodies are of families, and they were buried together. It’s safe to say that funeral arrangements were a responsibility of the close family for a very long time, and those family members wanted to make more lavish structures to honor their dead.

8 Among The Catacombs

From the tombs of old, it was only a matter of time before the structures built in the honor of the dead became both more intricate and more massive. Catacombs are vast, labyrinthine underground cemeteries that can house tons of bodies. These excavated structures are like whole cities of tombs underneath the ground where the living dwelled.^[4]

Catacombs served a whole new purpose that the graves of old simply couldn’t: They were accessible . . . but they weren’t too accessible. Throughout history, grave robbing was a real problem that people faced, with graves not only desecrated but belongings and even whole bodies being stolen. Catacombs provided accessible galleries where people could enter and pay their respects, while resting loved ones and precious belongings that needed to be hidden could literally rest in peace, even in times of constant strife. Needless to say, between sheer depth and secret, labyrinthine passages, people who buried their dead in catacombs had little to fear in the way of grave robbers and other malicious persons.

But catacombs were more than just cemeteries underground; significant effort went into the art, architecture, and design of these subterranean cities of the dead. Some feature pillars which span several meters and walls made entirely from highly organized piles of bones, decorated in such a way to give a mosaic look or to add a pattern to an otherwise blank canvass of excavated earth.

7 Set Ablaze

The Vikings had a rather unique and lengthy process for honoring their dead and lost loved ones. For high-status members of Viking society, they would place the dead atop a ship and sail them off into the seas and into eternity. Often, the Vikings would set the ship ablaze before pushing it off into the water so that the flames would burn the bodies up and distribute them into the air. This was, however, reserved for only the Vikings of extremely high social status, as this was a time-consuming practice, and it would have been unthinkably grueling to have to build an entire ship, a task that took hundreds, if not thousands, of labor hours, for each and every burial.

The ships weren’t always sailed off, nor were they always set ablaze, but we know that they were involved in particularly important rituals that paid respect to great warriors or leaders. The Oseberg ship is a Viking vessel found buried on land. The remains of the ship were found near Oslo, Norway, right after the discovery of a similar ship. Both were buried into hills or mounds. Carbon dating places the Oseberg ship around the early 1200s, the height of the Viking era. The ship is tremendously well-preserved, with the skeletons of two women, one in her eighties and the other in her fifties, found alongside two axes that were also extremely well-preserved.^[5] The ship itself has been put out on display at the University of Oslo, along with its contents.

6 Burials Of The Black Death

During the Black Death in the 1340s and 1350s, bodies were piling up in the streets, and the dead were quickly becoming innumerable. The plague was so deadly that between 30 and 60 percent of Europeans died. Stop and think about that for a second: You’ve got ten close friends or family members when the pandemic hits; three to six of them won’t make it. The plague was a terrifying time.

As we’ve seen, up until this point in history, funeral and burial rituals were often elaborate, even as far back as the Paleolithic, but once the plague came about, the dead were simply too numerous to bury and far too deadly to handle for fear of further spreading the infection. The plague quickly enveloped Europe, and soon, some bizarre strategies to deal with the disease sprung up. You’ve probably seen depictions of plague doctors dressed as birds, though this costume didn’t come about until the 1600s. As much as the bird outfits looked like the product of some macabre superstition, they were actually very sensible; the masks and overcoats protected doctors from contact with the disease. Even in the 1340s, though, they definitely knew that coming into contact with the plague victims could be fatal.

The culture that sprang up during the several centuries of plague that haunted Europe could very well be seen as one giant funeral ritual. And here’s where the phrase “no man’s land” came to be: In 1348, the Bishop of London bought a property appropriately called “No-Man’s Land” for burying plague victims. Here, the dead would be stacked several bodies high without much regard to funeral rites at all and then covered with dirt so as to prevent spread of the infection.^[6] When No-Man’s Land filled up, another man bought an adjacent 13-acre property for more plague burials. This was genius, and another notable feature of these properties was that they were far removed from London. The Black Death was the peak time in history where funeral rituals were less concerned with honoring the dead and more concerned with not joining them.

5 La Danse Macabre

The French phrase that’s been popularized in Western literature and art literally translates to “The Dance of Death” and has a fascinating history. As the bodies piled up throughout the plague, people came up with various ways to cope, and among them was the expression of death as a personified entity. Much art, literature, culture, and even music reflected the death that was seemingly all around the European world at the time. This all served as a sort of comforting acceptance of the universality of dying. Death is not only inevitable but also impartial, and it doesn’t care whether you’re rich or poor, a saint or a sinner; it comes for us all. This concept also served, in a time of much social stratification, as an equalizer: No matter how good you think you have it, death comes for us all.

But make no mistake, La Danse Macabre was certainly more than just a tradition of interesting-looking art; it was a tradition that, in the personification of death, helped with the grieving process for those who’d lost friends and loved ones. What seem like grim, dark relics of history were actually, at the time, expressions of life and death both, much of which was intended to be comedic. Through elaborate plays, elegant paintings, sweet, soulful music, and yes, even comedy, people of the Middle Ages lived La Danse Macabre to gain mastery over the death that beset them on all sides. It gave them a sense of control, at least in mind.^[7]

4 Flagellants

Another strange tradition of death that sprang up from the plague was self-flagellating, as was performed by religious sects. People would go walking through the European cities and towns beating, carving, and cutting themselves; these sects also denied themselves food and water and would starve themselves. They lived an extremely ascetic life deprived of pleasure, thinking that the plague was from God for man’s straying from Him in the pursuit of earthly pleasures.^[8]

In a terrifyingly uniform fashion, these masochists would waltz into a city that was plagued with death and riddled with corpses, head straight for the local church to give their prayers, and then find the town center, where they would form into a circular unit and begin their litany of self-harm and abuse. With large, knotted whips, they would beat themselves and each other in hopes of pleasing God and fending off the death that had beset the city they found themselves in. While flagellants, like ascetics, existed long before the Black Death, never had it been so popularized and practiced out in the open before. The Black Death made flagellants a household name.

3 New Orleans Jazz Funeral

The opposite of the flagellants abusing themselves and depriving themselves of all earthly pleasures are the participants in New Orleans jazz funerals. Of course, a prominent part of the jazz funeral is a procession carrying the coffin to be buried, but there’s more to it than that. These traditions of death are essentially block parties where the living celebrate the deceased with big parades and loud music. It’s not uncommon to see people dressed up in costumes dancing around the streets. Music, especially jazz, is a prominent feature of every aspect of New Orleans life; this comes from the rich traditions of La Danse Macabre and the African roots of celebration of all aspects of life, including death.^[9]

And these block parties are no small deals, either; some have lasted up to a week. They have horses, radio stations with DJs and loudspeakers, headdresses, and so on. But this isn’t just a vain excuse for a good time; there is a rich meaning of life after death woven into the celebration.

2 Dead Friends

On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, there is a bizarre custom (to those in the Western world, at least) where the participants actually develop a relationship with the dead, their deceased friends and loved ones, in a festival called the Ma’nene. This tradition tells its followers to exhume the buried corpses of those they care about and treat them like living human beings. Every three years, they dig up their dead and then proceed to bathe them, clothe them, carry them around wherever they go, and generally live with them—at least for a little while.^[10]

The mummified cadavers are made to resemble the dead persons’ appearance in life, at least as much as possible. This highly formalized event isn’t something new; it’s been with Torajan culture for hundreds of years. While not many people practice this today, it’s referred to as the way of the ancients.

1 Death In The Space Age

It was only a matter of time before the human race and its fascination with death and the traditions surrounding it went high-tech. Enter burial in the space age. Companies are now springing up to offer you the chance to blast your loved one into the night sky, offering the concept of having them rest among the stars. In this process, the person’s remains are cremated and then sent outside of the Earth’s atmosphere for a true outer space burial tradition. This idea doesn’t come without options: You can choose if you want your loved one to enter space and then return to Earth, go into Earth orbit, orbit or land on the Moon, or even be launched into deep space.^[11] Those whose ashes are orbiting the Earth could be said to be looking down upon us.

But more than becoming a cremated pile of resting remains in space is offered. You can also choose to have the DNA of your loved one sent into deep space, presumably in hopes that some life-form may inherit it and that somehow, the most fundamental unit of your loved one will integrated into an alien society or perhaps will merge with other building blocks of life and start a completely new race.

At present, space burials are relatively new, having started in the 1990s, so the question looms as to what will happen to them and how we will look back on them in the future. Will they be bizarre, almost superstitious practices like flagellation to ward off constant sickness and death? Or might we be onto something a bit more progressive and nuanced? Like all of the items on this list, time will tell, and as humankind progresses further into the future, so, too, will our desire to honor our loved ones with elaborate traditions.

I like to write about dark stuff, the macabre, death, history, and philosophy. I’m still running Murderworkis: Horror and All Things Creepy, as well as Serial Killer Memes, Beautifully Disturbed and more. This will be shared on those pages, hopefully bringing readership.