The Last Week of Winter Contest

Hi to you all!

It's the third Advent Sunday and the last week of Winter contest. Today I wanted to talk about my winter holidays. I did write a little bit about St Nicholas Day in my previous posts and today is St Lucia's Day. Today we plant wheat in a flower pot as a simbol of fertility and a good new year. We put it on the table during a Christmas lunch.

Two weeks before Christmas /right about now/ we start cleaning the house. It has to be spotless, like the divine control will stop by and check if it is enough clean. Like if we don't do it we won't be allowed to celebrate Christmas :)

The day before Christmas is lent and for lunch we have codfish. It's a tradition that my father and I prepaire it. Also, as mentioned before, we decorate the tree on a Christmas Eve before going to a Midnight Mass. We decorate a real tree, which is another source of stress because it's never tall enough or thick enough. After the Mass we open the gifts and eat all delicious stuff we prepaired during the week before Christmas. Another tradition is to sleep late on Christmas :) eat lunch and have a family come over and we exchange gifts.

We take down all the decorations on January the 20th. That day is a day of our town saint protectors.

To start with my own celebrations, I'm giving this week's commenter a choice of books (state in your comment which one you prefer) with Christmas story within. I haven't read any of those two but they were recommended to me. I hope you'll like them:

Choice number 1

Choice number 2

All you have to do is comment to be elligible and to be from one of the countries to which The Book Depository delivers :) The contest is open until Saturday 12/19/2009 and the winners from all three weeks will be randomly chosen and announced on 12/20/2009 - the forth Advent Sunday.