This weekend, Americans are lighting fireworks, eating hot dogs, and celebrating 250 years of existence with the particular enthusiasm of a country that really commits to its own mythology. And honestly? Good. Birthdays should be celebrated.

But spending as much time abroad as I have has taught me something: every culture has its version of this. The day or week or month when normal life pauses, strangers become friends, and a place reveals something about itself that you simply cannot witness any other time of year.

Most travelers already know the headliners. Carnival in Rio and Venice. Oktoberfest in Munich. The Christmas markets that turn every cobblestoned square in Europe into something from a snow globe. Holi, the Hindu festival of color that turns streets across India into an explosion of powder and celebration. These are famous for good reason. They are extraordinary.

But the holidays I find myself thinking about most aren't always the ones in the guidebooks.

Fallas, Valencia (March)

I had never heard of Fallas until I mentioned to my mother that I might be moving to Valencia for work. She was immediately excited. You have to experience Fallas, she said. I barely even knew where Valencia was.

Fallas is a festival running through mid-March during which every neighborhood in Valencia commissions an enormous sculpture, some reaching five stories tall, built from papier-mâché and wood. The structures are satirical, political, beautiful, and occasionally alarming. They go up all at once, in an all-night construction push called la Plantà, and the city wakes up the next morning to find hundreds of these things standing in its streets. Then, on March 19th, they burn all of them down. Every single one, simultaneously, across the entire city. What I was not prepared for the first time was how emotional it is. These structures are genuinely beautiful. They exist for less than a week.

That's the headline, but the festival is three weeks of events before you even get to the burning. Every afternoon in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, there is a mascletà: not quite a fireworks display, better described as a choreographed percussion performance using explosives. The ground shakes. Your chest vibrates. People show up specifically for the physical experience of standing in it.

I lived through multiple Fallas in Valencia and have been back for it since. It is one of those experiences that genuinely cannot be described adequately. It's not a tourist event with a local veneer. It's the opposite: a local event that tourists are welcome to witness.

Ferragosto, Italy (August 15)

If you've ever tried to do anything practical in Italy in mid-August and found every door shuttered, every restaurant closed, every city inexplicably emptied of actual Italians, you have encountered Ferragosto without knowing its name.

Ferragosto is the Italian national holiday on August 15th, but in practice it functions less like a single day and more like a collective understanding that August belongs to vacation. The entire country disperses. Romans flee to the coast. Milanese empty out to the lakes or the mountains. Families reconvene at country homes, the kind of gathering that in America we'd reserve for Thanksgiving, except here the whole country is doing it at once, and the cities they leave behind become ghost towns populated mostly by confused tourists wondering where everyone went.

Think of it as Italy's Thanksgiving in that sense: a moment when the country collectively agrees to stop, gather with the people they love, and be somewhere else. The difference is the somewhere else is usually more beautiful than a dining room.

If you are traveling Italy in August, plan around this. Certain restaurants and shops will simply be closed for the month. The tradeoff is that beach towns and hill villages come spectacularly alive, and you get to see a version of the country that moves at a completely different pace.

The more I've traveled, the more I've come to believe that holidays are one of the best entry points into understanding a place. Not the monuments. Not the food (though I am obviously not giving that up). The holidays. The things people stop everything for.

So I want to know: what's a lesser-known holiday or festival you think more people should know about? Something you stumbled into, or grew up with, or heard about from someone like my mother who just knew. Reply and tell me. The best ones are going to make it into a future issue.

If you're in the U.S. this weekend: happy 250th. Light something on fire. It's tradition.