Winter Traditions
Our Traditional Winter Culture
The most popular winter customs are related to the great feast of Christmas and New Year celebration: carols, The Star songs, “Plugusorul”,” sorcova”, games with masks, popular theatre and dance (“calutii”, “calusarii”).
All mask games are illustrating the never ending fight between the old year and the new one, between the beautiful and the ugly, between bad things and good things.
Christmas is the most popular holiday around the world. Is the time of snow and Santa Clause. Everyone is around their family and fiends and exchange gifts and Christmas Carols.
New Year's Eve
Celebrating the beginning of a new year is the oldest of the holidays known today, having a length of over 4000 years.
Ancient customs, transmitted from generation to generation, are bringing to our homes the beauty of the Romanians specific habits.
New Year habits- Games with masks
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The Goat
The goat is harmoniously integrated into the broader habits related to the winter holidays. The mask of the costume is built from a goat's head carved in wood, with lower mobile jaw to be pulled with a rope and during the dance. The head is framed by two cornice decorated with mirrors, multiple ribbons, and flowers, and is fixed to a stick. The person who plays goat is covered with a traditional fabric sewn over with silk ribbons.
- The Deer
- The Bear
Signs about the New Year
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On the night between years, unmarried girls find out things about their future husband.
They hide under bowls objects like mirror, coal, bread, money, jewels. The object they find when they choose a bowl will tell them what will be their fate. If they find bread, it means that they will marry a rich man, salt means hi is poor, the mirror is pride, and coal means that the man has dark hair.
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Onion Calendar
In the evening between years, farmers make "onion calendars" to find out how the weather will be in the coming year. One of the family members chose a large and healthy onion and cuts it into two halves. Next he takes 12 consecutive layers of the onion from outside inwards, and place them on a table. The first sheet is striped with a knife and is January. Clockwise in the other layers are placed, each representing one month of the year. Then salt is placed on each sheet and left in a dark place. The next morning the oldest man in the family studies the amount of water collected in each sheet and tells witch month will be rainy or drought the next year.
The colour of our cloths has a meaning
On Winter Holydays we have to choose carefully the colour of our cloths.
* White - peace, innocence, virtue, chastity, reconciliation
* Blue - peace, satisfaction, tenderness, love, affection
* Yellow - aspiration, originality, joy, spontaneousness
* Gray - melancholy, sadness, boredom
* Black - sobriety, sadness, mourning, solitude, separated, death
* Orange - expressing desire, excitability, dominance, erotism
* Red - will, dominance, warmth, eroticism, action, life
* Green - concentration, renaissance, certainly bold, abstinence, persistence
Weather signs
- The first days of December tells us the weather for the next ten weeks.
- When the dogs bark to the moon it will soon be freezing.
- After a hard winter it will come a wealthy year.
- Wild geese are the harbinger of heavy winter.
- Excessive snow on the trees branches mean fewer leaves in the spring.