Kalanta-singing, Hogmanay Traditions, More Derivations and Artistic Attempts.

You’ll be glad to hear my symptoms have almost retreated, so no more nasty poems - I promise.   

The last day of 2013 was busy with preparations to celebrate the turn of the year. I tend to go into a manic clean-up phase so that the new year arrives to find our homestead spick, span, spruce and gleaming.

 A welcome break from chores : our neighbours, Maria and Marina, come to sing the Kalanta. While the Christmas songs, much like the carols, focus mainly on the lowly birth and express festive greetings, the New Year Kalanta can vary from place to place. They usually mention Aghios Vasilis, Saint Basil, whose name-day is celebrated on January 1^st and it is traditionally he who brings the children gifts on New Year’s Eve. The content common to all is the wish that the new year bring health and happiness to the residents of the house being visited. Despite a missing front-tooth and the balloon being a poor substitute for the traditional triangle, the girls sang us the Kalanta with gusto, charm and a great degree of cuteness. 

In return Kalanta singers receive the traditional gift of coins and sweets and of those one of the most popular is the traditional  melomakarona , or ‘honey cookies’ as the Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook describes them. Like shortbread in the Scottish Highlands, this is a delicious sweet which around Christmas and New Year is to be found in every household as a welcoming treat for visitors. 

The story of its apparent derivation is interesting: one component is meli – honey which, along with orange juice, helps to give these cookies their rich, luscious taste.  (The other ingredients are usually butter, sugar, oil, flour and grated lemon rind, with chopped walnuts for a final smothering - a marvellous melange!) The makarona, however uncovers a more complex explication. One suggestion is that it comes from the Greek of the Middle-Ages, makaronia, a food based on a flour dough which was prepared to honour the deceased, the makaritis.

 Whether our present-day sweet resembled its earlier namesake in appearance or shared similar ingredients has been lost in both culinary and linguistic mists. It is all hypothesis, but fascinating, nonetheless. There are only a few on the plate below and I have to ‘fess up:  we had already eaten most of them!

So here are the melomakarona along with home-made shortbread – a great cultural amalgam, right?- and some liqueurs made from our very own produce: mint and pomegranate.

                                                         

Recently our Hogmanay habit has been to have neighbours over for a Reveillant. Just before midnight, Ioannis sings for his supper by going outside while we switch off all the lights to send the old year off. His first task is to smash the dried pomegranate thereby conferring on us health and prosperity. Apparently the greater the ensuing mess, the more seeds spattered over my balcony tiles, the richer the blessing- and Ioannis really lobbed that thing.

 Next he lights the candle to symbolically bring in the ‘wee bairn’ of the year and we will then switch the lights back on and wish each other the very best. In Scotland the first-foot traditionally brings sweets, something alcoholic and a piece of coal or wood – thus symbolically ensuring the household will have food, drink and warmth throughout the year. The candle serves the warmth requirement, but Ioannis, from Serres, also follows his own family tradition and brings us a nice smooth stone. I understand this is to wish that the walls of your house remain stout and true. To me this seems to echo the final stanza of the Christmas Kalanta which says: 

 In this house where we’ve come

May no stone crack

And may the householder

 Live to a ripe old age.

Needless to say, our first- foot, having assiduously followed those poly-ethnic traditions, is the first to sample the treats pictured above.

 This year I have added charcoal as a ‘combustible alternative’ – more artistic than a lump of coal and relevant for me as in autumn I began attending art classes, a treat I’ve been promising myself for a while.  

 Being a beginner is always full of fun and frustration; add messy into the mix and that’s about the size of me with drawing or painting  materials. One technique we’ve been practising is to black out the entire sheet of paper with charcoal and ‘draw’ your subject by removing the colour with a putty rubber.  Below is an early attempt at representing a classical Greek profile. My initial effort looked much too effeminate – the hair didn’t help. So I changed the nose and chin to give a stronger, more pronounced profile. The outcome resembled the nasty puppet Mr Punch; his Anatolian near-equivalent, shadow–theatre puppet, Karakiozis; or even a wicked witch, without the chin-hair. This current version is slightly improved after softening said features a little. Recently a cousin saw it and asked if it was Alexander the Great. Eleni, I love you for your perceptiveness, imagination and ….kindness!  

 But my charcoal drawing is just a tad too monotone an image to end on, so here is a cheerier image: our Christmas cactus got its timing perfect this year and was a blaze of glorious blooms all through the festive season.

Maria K, thank you for joining us and welcome to our merry band of followers.

 May 2014 bring you all everything you could wish for.