Celebrate good times, come on
Let’s celebrate
Sung by Kool & the Gang
I have long maintained that travelling teaches us that people around the world have more in common than we sometimes realise. People everywhere laugh, cry, worry, and hope for the same basic things. And when good things happen, we celebrate. There are small family celebrations: a new baby, a wedding, a birthday. And then there are the celebrations that bring people together on a much bigger scale. A national holiday, a religious festival, a sporting success …
We’ve never travelled to see or take part in a specific celebration. But we’ve been fortunate to stumble across one from time to time. For Patti’s Lens Artists challenge this week I want to share four of them, plus one closer to home that we did deliberately attend.
Patti says, ‘Limit your photos to 5, if you can!’ Well, you know me well enough by now not to expect me to be able to stick to that limit. But I have limited myself to five galleries, and five photos in each – will that be acceptable, I wonder?!
Pyongyang, North Korea
We were in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, on the country’s National Day, celebrating the 71st anniversary of the founding of the DPRK. Our group’s itinerary was adapted to allow us to see how Pyongyangites celebrated the occasion.
The main activity was mass dancing outside the Pyongyang Indoor Stadium, as well as other parts of the city. We were able to watch the colourful spectacle from the steps of the nearby building.
The local participants were uniformly (or so it seemed to my untrained eye) in command of the steps and proficient at dancing. They seemed to me to be enjoying it, while taking the accurate performance of the different dances quite seriously. As with so many things on that trip, I couldn’t tell if they genuinely wanted to be here, dancing together, or if this was something they did because it was expected of them, like keeping the streets clean and the grass and flowers well-tended.
Other locals celebrated with picnics and barbeques in the park, again often with music and dancing, or with a family visit to a water park.
Cuenca, Ecuador
Our visit to the beautiful colonial city of Cuenca in the south of Ecuador coincided with a weekend when two festivals were taking place: the nationally-celebrated Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) and the local celebrations that mark the anniversary of the city’s independence from Spain on 3rd November 1820. The city was in party mood and the various celebrations added to our enjoyment of it.
The city’s main square, the Parque Calderón, was especially lively, with a variety of entertainments laid on for the local families who had flocked here to join the celebrations. There were stilt walkers, musicians, photographers with props (you could have your photo taken as a cowboy sitting on a model pony, for instance) and people selling all sorts of food and drink as well as cheap toys. The All Saints Day procession passed through this square. It blended religious symbolism with floats depicting periods in the city’s history.
Observance of the Day of the Dead is strongest among the native people of Ecuador, the Kichwa. Stalls were selling the decorations in white and purple which people buy to decorate the graves of their relatives.
By the city’s main river, Rio Tomebamba, we came across a part of the independence festival designed to celebrate the cultures of all the Latin American countries. There were dancers from Cuba and Argentina, among others, and stalls selling alpaca scarves from Peru and wood carvings from the Brazilian Amazonia.
Cape Verde
By another happy coincidence we were in Praia, on the island of Santiago, on the day of its Mardi Gras carnival parade. This is a rather low-key celebration compared to those on some of the Cape Verde islands, but in some ways was all the more enjoyable for that reason. It felt like a very local affair, with relatively few tourists among the crowds lining the streets.
Waiting for it to start I amused myself taking photos of some of the many children who had come along in fancy dress to watch the parade, not to mention a few adults!
The parade was headed by dancers representing the occupations of Praia – chefs, musicians and others we were unsure of. Then another group of dancers appeared, representing the island’s history and African heritage. Oddly some were covered in blue paint for a reason we couldn’t fathom.
There were only two floats but both of them wonderfully colourful. One was decorated to look like three volcanoes, with those on it dressed in flame colours and preceded by more dancers all dressed in orange. The other was all in blue and silver, crowned with stars and with dancers again dressed in coordinating colours.
Children’s festivals in Japan
Another happy coincidence saw us in Nikko, Japan, when families were celebrating the Shichi-Go-San festival at Futarasan shrine. This falls officially on 15th November but can be marked on any day in October or November. The name means Seven-Five-Three and the festival is a rite of passage for girls aged 3 and 7, and boys aged 3 and 5. Children dress in traditional clothes including beautiful kimonos for the girls. They are taken to Shinto shrines, where an oharai purification rite is performed and a prayer recited for their children’s health. The children are given protective, long-life candy called chitose-ame.
Meanwhile in Takayama we saw a family celebrating Hatsu Miyamairi (also called Omiyamairi) at the Sakurayama Hachimangu shrine. This is another traditional Japanese Shinto rite of passage, in which a newborn baby is brought to a local shrine for the first time. Families give thanks for a safe birth and pray for the child’s future health and long life.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England
And finally for something rather different. This celebration was much closer to home, and we attended it very intentionally. In March 2025 Newcastle United won their first domestic trophy for seventy years, the Carabao Cup. We weren’t able to get tickets for the match but watched it with fellow fans in London. But later that month we travelled north to join the city’s celebrations.
Buildings around Newcastle were decorated to mark the occasion, and thousands lined the streets to watch the players parade the cup on an open-top bus, before partying on the Town Moor.
I would love to be able to tell you about more celebrations, such as the Palio della Balestra in Gubbio, Italy, a children’s dance festival in Riga, Latvia, the festival Medieval Days in Tallinn, Estonia, or partying with locals in Redding, California, on July 4th. But I promised to stick to five, so five it is!
For now …
