Winter Traditions and Holidays Part 9 - Keeping your goat guiding realness

Brumalia

An ancient Roman, winter solstice festival honouring Saturn/Cronus and Ceres/Demeter, and Bacchus.

• By the Byzantine era, celebrations and lasted for a month, until Saturnalia.
• The festival included night-time feasting, drinking, and merriment. During this time, prophetic indications were taken as prospects for the remainder of the winter.
• Roman life, during classical antiquity, centred on the military, agriculture, and hunting. The short, cold days of winter would halt most work.
• Brumalia was a festival celebrated during this dark, interludal period.

Koliada

• Slavic pagan holiday which may be used to refer to the winter solstice and Christmas.
• It was considered the day when the Black God and other spirits associated with decay and darkness were most potent.
• It was celebrated by pagan Slavs on December 21, the longest night of the year and the night of the winter solstice.
• On this night, Hors, symbolizing old sun, becomes smaller and dies - defeated by the dark and evil powers of the Black God. On December 23 Hors is resurrected as the new sun, Koleda.
• This holiday is associate with ancestor worship and Slavs light fires at cemeteries to keep their loved ones warm, and organized feasts to honor the dead. They also lit logs at local crossroads.
• As part of Christmas it applies to children and teens who walk house to house greeting people, singing and sifting grain which denotes best wishes and receiving candy and small money.

Malanka - Goat guiding (13 January 2017)

• A Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian folk holiday on New Year's Eve in the Julian calendar
• Earth (Lada) had two children, a son (Moon) and a daughter (Spring-May)
• Her evil uncle, the Devil kidnapped her one-day when the Moon was hunting. While she was gone, the Earth was left without spring, but once she was released, spring returned.
• Carolers traditionally went from house to house playing pranks or acting out a small play, with a bachelor dressed in women's clothing leading the troop.
• Traditionally, the first thing to do when you are invited into the family's house is to have the eldest male throw wheat grains around the entrance, which gifts the family with happiness, health, love, luck and more.