In colonial North America, Guy Fawkes Night was known as Pope Day.
The observance crossed the Atlantic with English settlers and became especially prominent in colonial New England, where it was commonly called Pope Night or Pope Day. It was held on 5 November, the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’s arrest while guarding explosives beneath the House of Lords in 1605.
Colonial celebrations retained the original event’s anti-Catholic character more openly than many modern British observances. Crowds organized processions, built bonfires, and burned an effigy of the pope. In Boston, rival groups sometimes fought over the right to control the celebration, and the event could become a noisy form of working-class protest against wealthy or unpopular figures.
The name can be confusing because “Pope Day” did not celebrate the pope. It referred to the anti-Catholic symbolism of the colonial festival. The custom declined after the American Revolution, as its connection with British political traditions became less welcome, but the name survives in historical accounts of colonial America.