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They say only children love holidays but that is not true. Everybody in Russia loves holidays because they make our life more beautiful. My favorite holidays are the New Year's Day, birthdays, St. Valentine's Day, Easter and Shrovetide.
New Year is the most loved holiday of the year. The old year finishes and loses its power, while the new one comes into power and is ready to bring something new into our lives. There is a belief that you will live the coming year the way you see the New Year in. That's why since pagan times people have been preparing lots of food and drinks for the holiday, trying to do no work on the eve. People dance and play, they are busy with merrymaking. Everyone gets a lot of presents. There are fireworks and parades.
But birthdays are also great holidays for everyone 1 like my birthday parties. There are many traditions connected with birthdays. I think the tradition to celebrate it with friends is a great one. We usually invite and receive many guests who are my classmates and other friends and my parents' friends.
An important feature of the holiday is cooking. We have a lot of fun cooking food. It is a tradition in my family to cook many salads and to decorate them, I cook many of them myself, for example, the cucumber and tomato salad. I like to stuff tomatoes with the filling of garlic, ham and eggs. Another important feature is great cleaning. Everything has to be washed, dusted, cleaned, tidied and polished. It is done to create a special holiday atmosphere. The third feature is a new dress or another article of clothing to be put on. It is usually a present from my parents or from my grandparents.
It is always given on the eve to give me time to prepare it for the holiday. In the morning I get up and see many presents on the table. These are presents from my family. They usually give me clothes, books, records, sometimes money. My little sister always draws nice pictures for me. When the guests come, they give me their presents and we sit down to the table to have the holiday meal. Then we dance, sing songs, play games and act out small scenes. Adults take part, too. We divide into two teams. One team shows a scene without saying any names. The other team is to guess the title of the book, the author and the characters. Sometimes we play charades. That's more difficult, but it is fun as well. After that we may go for a walk. At about 11 o'clock it is time to part. The guests usually help to clean after the holiday.
I also like St. Valentine's Day. This holiday became popular just a few years ago, but has many fans now, especially among the young. It is celebrated on the 14th of February. Numerous generations of young people honoured St. Valentine as the holy patron of love and lovers. There are many legends about St. Valentine. Some people say he was a priest who married lovers against the Roman laws. Others don't agree with this. They say that this day, February, 14, was the day when young Romans chose their sweethearts for the year and exchanged the tokens of love. Since then the day has become very popular. There are two types of gifts and congratulations given on the day — love ones and humorous ones. Lovers exchange postcards saying «Be my Valentine!» and other sweet words, red roses, boxes of chocolates and sweet little toys. Children, colleagues and friends exchange humorous gifts. I like to send letters and postcards to my friends and relatives wishing them all their dreams to come true. I make postcards myself cutting out a piece of cardboard in the shape of a heart, drawing a picture on it and writing a message on the other side.
I also like Shrovetide. It had been the most loved Slavic pagan holiday, but after Russia was baptized its meaning slightly changed. After the October Revolution it was prohibited and forgotten. Now it becomes more and more popular and we learn about the traditions of Shrovetide. It is celebrated during a whole week and so its complete name is butter-week or cheese-week. These are the meanings of the days of this week:
Monday - seeing in
Tuesday - making advances
Wednesday - delicacies
Thursday — big Thursday
Friday — mother-in-law evening
Saturday - daughter-in-law gathering
Sunday - seeing off.
This week is followed by Lent. That's why people wanted to eat and drink at pleasure. The traditional dish is pancakes with different fillings such as jams made of all imaginable berries and fruit, butter, meat, cottage cheese, sour-cream and even caviar. People spend time tobogganing, riding sledges, watching skomorokhs and merry-making. The last day of Shrovetide, Sunday, is the day when Winter is seen off. The most important act of the day was burning of the guy of Winter. You can see the celebrating in the film of Nikita Mikhalkov «The Siberian Barber». It is a wonderfully acted scene. Now it is celebrated the way it was celebrated years ago - with out-door parties, shows and the guy of Winter burnt in the end. It was a breath-taking experience for me to ride in a sledge!
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