From The Ukrainian Weekly, April 4, 2010 (If you don't subscribe to it yet -- do so! http://www.ukrweekly.com/ )
WATCH THE WHACKING WILLOWS… AND OTHER STRANGE THINGS
Orysia Paszczak Tracz
The man ahead of me in line to receive the loza on Kvitna Nedilia (Flower, or Palm Sunday) looked bewildered. He got the myrovannia (anointing with oil on the forehead), and his fat pussy willow
branch, and as he was headed towards the exit, watched the members of
the congregation hitting each other (gently, of course) with the
branches, and smiling and reciting something. The people
who already received the branches even went back through the pews to
gently hit the ones who were still waiting in line. Then I did it to him, and he was really confused. He had no idea what was going on! I
explained to him that this was a special ritual for Ukrainian Palm
Sunday, and that it meant that Easter and spring were coming, and also
meant a wish for health. He smiled and thanked me for the information, saying that now he understood. The man was clearly not Ukrainian, but loves the service, the singing, and the rituals, and comes every Sunday. I’m not sure what he’ll think about people bringing baskets of food to church on Easter.
He is not the first person to be confused and confounded about our old but new ways. There really is an explanation for all this. What is admirable and amazing is that these rituals, well modified to suit the present, are still carried out at all.
In the olden days, we had Ukrainians sleeping on the stove/oven – ok, the pich (peech) – an appliance/piece of furniture pretty difficult to explain in English. Then
you have young folks dumping pails of water on each other on the second
day of Easter (nowadays, the SuperSoaker works so much better). At
Midsummer’s Night (Kupalo to us) they also jump over bonfires, alone or
holding hands with a significant other. On special feast days, rolling around in the early morning dew in your birthday suit was also very common and beneficial. The
jumping over bonfires at Kupalo is no longer birthday-suit-obligatory,
as it used to be extremely long ago [that wouldn’t go over too well with
the camp uprava, eh?]. Of course, in the weeks after
Easter, there will be services, and food and drink in the cemeteries, on
the graves of the departed. This is reminiscent of El Día de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead, the honoring of ancestors also from time immemorial. And
I am sure many of us still follow our mother’s ritual of burying the
eggshells and other remnants of the Easter breakfast deep in the garden. With composting being so popular now, we’re really “with it” – but then, we’ve always been, right?
These are all traditions and rituals from our ancient past, from pre-Christian times. They each had particular reasons, purposes, and symbolism for the actions. The power of traditions has kept them alive through all the persecution and hardship of our people through the centuries. The
fact that these strange and often not well understood actions are still
done so enthusiastically and so willingly by people far-removed by time
and place from their ancestral homeland shows how indeed powerful
tradition is. We continue to write our pysanky and bake our paska and babka for Velykden’ [Great Day – a pre-Christian name that survived, and is still the Ukrainian name for Easter]. We
sit down to the Easter breakfast and share the slices of the one egg (a
symbol of the togetherness of the family) and go to church to watch the
hahilky [ritual spring round-dances]. At Christmas, we
reverently sit down for the special Sviata Vechera [Holy Supper] of
twelve dishes, leaving that empty chair and place setting for our
ancestors. At weddings today, the couple stands on a
rushnyk [ritual cloth] and has its hands ceremonially bound with a
rushnyk by the priest, and often the “crowns” on the couple’s heads are
wreaths of barvinok (periwinkle). These rituals – and so
many more -- are practiced in Canada, the USA, Brazil, the Balkans,
other countries in Europe, Australia, the far east of Russia in Zelenyi
Klyn, as well as in the homeland itself. Some of the
modifications that have emerged in Ukraine are quaint or even bizarre,
but then some of the ones in the other places are pretty strange, too. But
the thought is there, as is the inherent desire to carry out an action
that connects us to our distant, very distant ancestors. We are very
rich, indeed.
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