Weird Holidays You’ve Never Heard Of

La Tomatina

La Tomatina is an epic food fight festival that takes place on the last Wednesday of August each year in the town of Bunol near Valencia in Spain. It is recognized as the ‘World’s Biggest Food Fight’. During this festival, participants throw tomatoes that are specially shipped and pre-crushed for locals and tourists to throw at each other, purely for entertainment purposes. In recent years, anywhere from 20-40,000 people have participated in it. It’s gotten so big, people who put on the event have had to limit participants. Its origin is just as interesting as the event itself. It started on the last Wednesday of August in 1945 when a group of young people went to the town square to attend a huge local parade. They jumped on a float and in their excitement, they caused a man to fall off. In his rage, he began to hit everyone in his path, throwing vegetables at people in what later became a furious crowd. The following year, the same people replicated what happened before, and from then on, it became a local tradition.

Create a Vacuum Day

This odd and unofficial holiday, celebrated on February 4, is of unknown origin. We don’t even know the creator. Because of this, we can only speculate how this holiday began. Some have speculated that the day was created by a hard-working but disgruntled housewife who was tired of doing this tedious task, so she created “Vacuum Day” or “No Vaccuming Day”. Overtime, the name went through a few changes, one being with the add of the word “Create” to the title. Some believe this happened as a result of a scientist who wanted to celebrate the creation of a vacuum during laboratory work. The other theory is that someone who wanted a simpler life, wanted to create a vacuum that sucked up all the clutter of life. On this day, they could enjoy a day of leisure. While little is known of the origin, we know that on the day, some use the hashtag #CreateAVacumDay on social media to display pictures of their 'created' vacuums.