Easter traditions vary widely among places that celebrate the holiday, and some can be pretty darn weird. One is the annual bottle kicking competition in the British village of Hallaton. The team from Hallaton competes with the people of nearby Medbourne to carry a "bottle" (actually three small wooden kegs) across two streams a mile apart. There is an old legend that explains the beginnings of the custom involving a miraculous hare that saved two women from a charging bull. Gratitude went to God, and not the hare, which was given to the church to be made into a pie for the poor. What does that have to do with bottle kicking? The story is a bit complicated, but it evolved into the annual competition between the two villages.
The competition has few rules, and resembles a melee. The festival surrounding the competition held each Easter Monday has been going for a couple of hundred years, but may be much older. Some consider bottle kicking to be the origin of rugby, which uses a ball shaped sort of like a keg, that Americans would recognize as a football. Read about the Easter sport of bottle kicking and see plenty of pictures at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Michael Trolove/Bottle Kicking/CC BY-SA 2.0)