How Christmas is celebrated around the world

Christmas may be a shared holiday celebrated by billions of people, but the way it’s marked varies enormously from country to country, shaped by climate, history, religion and no small amount of local humour. Here’s a tour of some of the world’s most distinctive festive customs, and the stories behind how they came to be.

Brazil

In Rio de Janeiro, the Christmas tree takes a form found nowhere else in the world: a floating structure on the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon, glittering with nearly three million lights and drawing enormous crowds every night of the season. Since Christmas falls in the middle of the Brazilian summer, celebrations often spill outdoors, with fireworks over the lagoon and family gatherings that stretch late into the warm evenings.

Mexico

In the lead up to Christmas, Mexico celebrates Las Posadas, nine nights of processions that reenact Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter in Bethlehem. Groups move from house to house, singing and asking for lodging, before being welcomed in for songs, candle-lighting and the breaking of star-shaped piñatas filled with fruit and sweets. On the table, tamales are laboriously prepared in family kitchens over several days, a genuinely collective effort often involving multiple generations, and served alongside ponche navideño, a hot fruit punch spiked with cinnamon and cane sugar. In the Oaxaca region, there’s a tradition of carving radishes into elaborate festive scenes to display during the Noche de Rábanos, or “Night of the Radishes” festival, each December.

The Netherlands

Sinterklaas arrives by steamboat from Spain each November, greeted by parades and brass bands in towns across the country – a considerably earlier and very different entrance to the sleigh-riding Santa most of the world associates with the season. Dutch children leave shoes out by the fireplace or radiator in the hope of small gifts, and the figure of Sinterklaas himself, with his bishop’s mitre and staff, is one of the clearest surviving links back to the historical Saint Nicholas.

Iceland

Rather than a single Santa Claus figure, Icelandic children watch for the Yule Lads – 13 mischievous brothers who visit on 13 consecutive nights leading up to Christmas, each with their own particular habit of mischief, from slamming doors to stealing sausages. Children leave a shoe on their windowsill each night; well-behaved ones find small gifts left behind, while those who’ve misbehaved may find a rotting potato instead. The tradition is tied to older Icelandic folklore about trolls living in the mountains, gradually softened over time into the more playful version told to children today.

Russia

Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) travels with his granddaughter, Snegurochka (the Snow Maiden), bringing presents not on Christmas Day itself but on New Year’s Eve, reflecting Russia’s distinct festive calendar. During the Soviet era, when religious celebrations were officially discouraged, many Christmas customs were folded into New Year’s celebrations instead, which is why gift giving, decorated trees and festive gatherings remain centred on 31 December to this day – even as Orthodox Christmas is celebrated separately in January.

Poland

Wigilia, the Christmas Eve meal, begins only once the first star appears in the evening sky – a nod to the Star of Bethlehem – signaling that it’s time to sit down together. The meal centres on 12 meatless dishes, symbolising the twelve apostles, including pierogi, poppy seed cake and a vivid pink beetroot soup called barszcz. An extra place is often set at the table for an unexpected guest, a custom rooted in the idea that no traveller should be turned away on this particular night.

Colombia

Medellín’s Alumbrados Navideños lights festival attracts nearly four million visitors annually, transforming the city’s riverbanks with more than 30 million bulbs arranged into elaborate scenes and displays. What began several decades ago as a modest string of lights along the river has grown into one of the largest coordinated lighting displays in the world, now considered a major point of civic pride for the city.

The Philippines

The city of San Fernando stages the Giant Lantern Festival each December, where parols – star-shaped lanterns that can reach up to 20ft across – radiate in kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting patterns powered by thousands of individual bulbs. The tradition began humbly in the late 19th century with small paper lanterns lit by candles, carried through the streets to guide worshippers to early morning Mass, and has since grown into a full-blown competitive festival between neighbouring villages.

Japan

Christmas isn’t a public holiday in Japan and carries relatively little religious significance, but since the 1970s a marketing slogan – “Kentucky for Christmas!” – has turned fried chicken into the nation’s unofficial festive meal. The campaign was so successful that it’s now standard practice to place an order at KFC weeks in advance to avoid the long queues on the day itself, with many outlets selling special festive buckets that come complete with cake and champagne.

Spain

Catalonia’s Caganer, a small figurine of a peasant crouched in the act of defecating, is tucked discreetly into nativity scenes across the region as an earthy symbol of fertility, good luck and a down-to-earth reminder that everyone, however humble, has their place in the Christmas story. Rather than being seen as disrespectful, the figure is treated with genuine affection, and modern versions depicting celebrities and public figures have become a popular collectible in their own right.

Venezuela

In Caracas, streets across several neighbourhoods are closed to traffic on Christmas morning to make way for an unusual and cherished procession: locals rollerskating to early morning Mass. The custom is thought to have grown out of the sound of church bells combined with the ease of getting around on skates before the roads fill with holiday traffic, and it’s now such an established part of the city’s Christmas that children traditionally tie a piece of string to their toe and dangle it out of the window overnight, so skaters passing by can give it a friendly tug to wake them up in time.

Taken together, these traditions show just how adaptable Christmas really is – absorbing local humour, climate, food and culture wherever it lands, while still carrying the same underlying impulse found everywhere else in the world: bringing light, generosity and togetherness to the darkest nights of the year.