Xmas in Romania
In Romania, the winter holiday season is truly in full-swing from December 24 to January 7.
Highlights include: Christmas Day, New Year and Epiphany, with their respective eves. The most important feature of these celebrations is their unique variety of colorful Romanian customs, traditions, and believes, of artistic, literary, musical, and other folklore events, which make the winter holidays some of the most original and spectacular spiritual manifestations of the Romanian people.
Children of all ages go from house to house singing Christmas carols, or through the streets on New Year's Eve reciting congratulatory verse. The whole traditional village participates in waists, although mostly children practice this custom.
Carols form an important part of the Romanian folklore. Romanian carols are not simple songs (a sort of invocation in verse sung by children and lads, on the evening of Winters Holidays) with religions origin, but wide windows through which we are allowed once in a year to go by the immaculate snow-towards the evergreen Heaven and to eye-touch God at least for an instant , in order to give us the power to surpass the life's obstacles. Carols put people in the mood for a perfect communion with the simple and healing greatness of Jesus' Birth. The carol singers walk in the streets of the villages and towns holding in their hands a star made of board and paper with biblical scenes painted in water colors and they sing.
Five days before Christmas with a very sharp knife the pig is cut.
This custom is called "Ignatius" from Saint Ignatius (celebrated on December the 20th). Straws are put in his snout and then it is covered with burning straws and then is it singed. The pig is nicely washed and covered with a piece of cloth for ten minutes. The housewife comes and incense the pig and then the husband comes and makes the sign of the cross on the pig's head saying to the family gathered around: "Let's eat the pig!" After the pig is cut there is a feast called the pig's funeral feast or alms. At the feast the whole family friends and neighbors take part.
All eat the rid or the skin of the bacon and they also eat small pieces of fried pork they drink wine or plum brandy.
Romania is a country with several cultural influences, so Christmas traditions are quite diverse and cannot be generalized.
Labels: Traditions
posted by Nico(leta) @ 09:25,
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