In mid-April every year, Sri Lankans celebrate the Sinhala and Hindu New Year with distinctive rituals that fuse Hindu and Buddhist elements. With the introduction of Buddhism in the third century BCE, traditional Hindu New Year rituals were reinterpreted. While historians and sociologists believe these rituals were closely related to sun worship because they coincided with ancient myths about the sun moving from one celestial house to another—the major rituals today embody a sense of cultural heredity and tradition.