There are two important events in Mid-February of 2021: the start of the Year of the Ox and Valentine’s Day. Happiness and romance are in the air. Both at home and abroad various celebrations are held for the two western and Chinese festivals. Here are some activities recommended to you and few people will miss the chance to join in them.

The spirit of Christmas isn’t always so cheerful. Here are four unusual and a little scary Christmas traditions from around the world.

In order to make houses free from bad spirits for the New Year, Guatemalans do a full house clean in December. The dirt and dust is gathered from every home and each neighborhood creates a large amount of garbage. A devil statue is built and placed on top of the dirt, and burned. The bad luck is said to burn up with the devil.

To keep kids from stealing on Santa’s cookies, parents tell children a story about a story named Danny who ate all of Santa’s cookies and really angered his grandmother. She killed him and now his ghost visits houses during Christmas time.

Children who don’t receive new clothes by Christmas Eve will be eaten by the Yule Cat, a large and angry cat, which is said to hide in the snow. The strange tradition comes from farmers who used the myth to encourage their workers to finish making the autumn wool before Christmas.

If you find yourself in Ukraine around the holidays, you may be wondering: Is it Christmas or Halloween? Trees here are decorated with artificial spider webs and decorative spiders. The unusual tradition comes from a story where a spider wove a web around the tree of a poor family. When morning came, the white strands turned to precious metals and the family became rich. The webs today show good fortune for the next year.

Reading books brings with it numerous benefits giving people the opportunity to explore new worlds and meet new people both real and imagined. It expands our knowledge and understanding of the world around us and those far away.

To celebrate the wonderment of books and those that make them come to life, UNESCO established 23 April as World Book and Copyright Day in 1995. However, it got its start long before that in Spain.

Setting aside a day to celebrate books traces its beginnings to Spanish writer Vicente Clavel Andrés. In 1922 he proposed the idea as a way to honor fellow countryman author Miguel de Cervantes. Four years later the first celebration took place on 7 October, Cervantes’ birthday, but was moved to 23 April, the date of his death, in 1930.

In 1995, the UNESCO General Conference decided to pay admiration to authors and books world-wide as a way of encouraging everyone to access books. Choosing 23 April seemed a logical choice, besides being the date of Cervantes’ death, it also happens to be the date William Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega died, among other famous authors. Additionally, several distinguished authors were born on 23 April making it a symbolic date in the world literature.

Annually since 2001, one city around the world is chosen to be the UNESCO World Book Capital for a year. The selected city is tasked with carrying out activities over its year-long designation(指定) to encourage “a culture of reading and diffusing(传播) its values in all ages and population groups in and out of the national borders”.

The initiative was put forward by Spain in 2001, and Madrid was designated the first capital, followed by Alexandria and then New Delhi. Following those designations cities are chosen each year by the Director-General of UNESCO in consultation with an advisory committee made up of representatives from international organizations representing authors, libraries and publishers. UNESCO has named Accra as the 2023 World Book Capital.