What Are the World’s Oldest Holidays?

Honoring the beginning of a new year is one of the humanity’s oldest traditions. Long before written calendars, early societies watched the sky, tracked the seasons and created rituals based on nature’s cycles. Because many early celebrations predate writing, historians use artifacts, mythology and later records to learn how the oldest holidays in the world began.

Many historians say the winter solstice might be the oldest holiday in history. During the Neolithic Period, beginning around 10,000 B.C., communities marked the shortest day of the year with rituals that welcomed the sun’s return. Ancient monuments, such as Scotland’s Maeshowe tomb, England’s Stonehenge, Ireland’s Newgrange and France’s La Roche-aux-Fées, line up with the sunrise or sunset on the solstice.

These festivals likely blended feasting, storytelling and “some serious concern expressed in ritual form about the sun’s apparent demise,” Anthony Aveni writes in The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays.

Another contender for the oldest holiday is Akitu, the Babylonian new year festival, which dates to the third millennium B.C. and was held in cities including Babylon and Uruk. Celebrated after the spring equinox in March or April, during the first month of the Babylonian calendar, Akitu included parades and rituals meant to cleanse and reset the world for spring. One ceremony involved the Babylonian king being humiliated and slapped in the god Marduk’s temple; if he cried, people believed Marduk would affirm their ruler’s divine authority.

A strong case can be made that the oldest holiday people still observe today is New Year’s. Many historians trace modern new year traditions to ancient festivals like Akitu. Even today, New Year’s themes often include change, reflection and starting fresh.

Other ancient holidays that people still celebrate in modern times include the Jewish holidays of Passover and Purim. Whereas Purim is thought to have started in the 5th century B.C., Passover dates to the 1200s B.C., making it one of the oldest continuously practiced religious holidays.

“Rabbis, scholars and communal leaders differ on exactly why Passover maintains this enduring power,” Alana Newhouse, editor in chief of Tablet Magazine, writes in The New York Times. “Some argue that it is simply central to the religion—one of the three times a year when the ancient Israelites would make that pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem. Others point to the accessibility of the Seder ritual itself, which allows people of varying levels of knowledge and experience, including non-Jews, to participate.”

Many festivals from ancient times lost popularity as religions changed. Saturnalia, the hedonistic Roman festival around the winter solstice, influenced later holidays, including Christmas, but faded as Christianity spread. “More like our New Year celebrations, this was a festival dedicated on the one hand to the formal completion of the cycle of the seasons and on the other to preparations for a new one,” Aveni writes. Saturnalia was also an occasion when social norms, including the formalities of the class system, were relaxed.

The Romans’ Brumalia and Celtic Samhain are among the many other holidays no longer observed. These pagan seasonal festivals honored local gods associated with fertility, planting and harvesting. As Aveni writes, “Nature is where time begins,” but as religious and cultural systems shifted over time, many holidays were changed or blended into newer festive traditions.