Festivals

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

The Sinhala (Aluth Avurudda) and Tamil (Puthandu) New Year, the most eagerly awaited annual festival for Sri Lankan families all over the world, is over.

The New Year was celebrated as the sun moves from Pisces to Aries, marking the end of the harvest season. This is the week when families, primarily Buddhist and Hindu, get the opportunity to observe and perform religious ceremonies as one extended unit. Sri Lankans visit their respective temples, clad in new clothes, to pay their respects to the clergy and seek their blessings for the coming year.

Everything is not about religion, however. There are a host of traditions that are at once auspicious and fun. As the New Year approaches, houses are cleaned, new clothes in the recommended colour are bought and traditional sweetmeats are prepared. At the auspicious time, the New Year is welcomed with the boiling of fresh milk in a new clay pot, the spilling over of which is a symbol of the prosperity the whole family will hopefully enjoy in the New Year. Traditional milk rice, accompanied by the rest of the sweetmeats are then served to the family and to neighbours, to cement the solidarity of the community. There are also a host of fun-filled activities, beating of drums and games like pillow fighting and tug-of-war, which bring cheers and jeers from the spectators.

When I was approaching my teens, my father always took us to our home village of Hikkaduwa, where we met with all our cousins, a large number as my grandparents had nine adult children. We spent all our time together as a family, playing, chatting and fighting. Every morning, my father had us running to the beach, about two miles away. In those days, it was our private beach where we spent the most joyful of mornings, swimming, playing cricket and generally being a public nuisance. After a few hours, we ran back to our family home in Aratchikanda, where a delicious lunch of red rice, fish (ambul thiyal) and more vegetables than we thought existed, prepared by our grandmother, awaited us. It was the most memorable week of the year for me in my formative years.

Although the concept of the extended family is slowly disintegrating amongst Sri Lankan families overseas, it is very much alive in Sri Lanka. The week in mid-April is a holiday for many, when they head to their home villages and meet with the elders and peers of their families, for many the only time they see each other for the whole year. Unfortunately, for those of us whose families are scattered, both physically and emotionally, we have to rely on those memories, and perhaps embellish them in our minds as we grow older.

There are many other festivals in the world which are celebrated to perpetuate the concept of the unity of families. In the western world, the most renowned is Thanksgiving, celebrated in Canada and America, where families gather to celebrate the harvest and other blessings the past year has brought. The festival falls on the last Thursday of November, and the country closes down till the following Monday. Americans believe that their Thanksgiving is modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag people.

Thanksgiving is rich in legend and symbolism, and the traditional menu for Thanksgiving dinner is turkey, stuffing, yams, cranberries and pumpkin pie. Sri Lankans in America also celebrate Thanksgiving with their families. They include turkey and pumpkin pie in their fare; but invariably, there is also traditional Sri Lankan food like yellow rice and chicken curry, which, frankly, is far more palatable to us than the bland taste of roast turkey and yams.

Unfortunately, in the decades that followed, the descendants of those Anglo-Saxon pilgrims eliminated the descendants of the Wampanoag tribes, and all the millions of people of other tribes who owned the land, in the cruelest acts of genocide the world has ever seen. So today, I guess Thanksgiving is now celebrated for the bounty the American people have received from genocide. And slavery.

Another famous festival is Saint Patrick’s Day, celebrated by the Irish all over the world. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland. But the myth has overtaken the truth. St. Patrick did not banish the snakes from Ireland. There have been no snakes in Ireland since the Ice Age. Nor was Patrick Irish. Nor was he canonized by a Pope. Nor was his real name Patrick.

Patrick was captured from Northern Britain by Irish raiders and sold to slavery in Ireland. He escaped and went back to Britain, but around 433 A. D., he returned, against the wishes of his parents, to Ireland, with a mission to convert the Irish heathens to Christianity. He spent the last 30 years of his life in “baptizing Irish pagans, ordaining priests, and building churches and monasteries. Thomas Cahill writes in How the Irish Saved Civilization, “Patrick was really a first – the first missionary to barbarians beyond the reach of Roman law. The step he took was in its way as bold as Columbus’, and a thousand times more humane”.

St. Patrick’s day has been celebrated in Ireland for centuries, and March 17 is considered a holy day of obligation, when pubs were closed in Ireland. A holy day that has been transformed in modern times to a celebration, when getting drunk is almost mandatory. There are drunken St. Patrick’s Day parades all over the United States, started by Irish immigrants in New York and Boston.

As Rev Jack Ward, the Irish American priest says: “Drinking green beer doesn’t make you Irish, it just makes you pee. Real Irish men and women have a place in their hearts for St. Patrick”.

Not for celebrating with a lot of booze for chasing away snakes, but for converting Ireland to Christianity.

But what made me really sad was that the 9th annual Testicle Festival in Deerfield, Michigan, about 35 miles south of Ann Arbor, which was supposed to have taken place last week, has been postponed for May 9, because of Covid-19.

This is a hallowed tradition every year, celebrated not only in Deerfield, but in many small towns in America, which attracts thousands of pilgrims. The featured activity is the consumption of animal’s testicles, usually those of a bull, battered or fried, followed by much merrymaking.

Rivalling Deerfield, USA, the village of Ozrem in Serbia, holds the World Testicle Cooking Championship, serving up testicles in a variety of the arts of cuisine, including testicle pizza, testicle moussaka and goulash. The motto of the event is: “The Scots have their scotch, the Swiss their cheese, we the Serbs have balls”. It also gives awards for “ballsy” newsmakers. President Obama won the award in 2010.

In case anyone would like to attend or even participate in this signature event, it is scheduled to take place in Ozrem on September 2. Everyone who attends will be guaranteed to have a ball.