Holiday Greetings from Hungary ...
In Hungary each day has a saint named for it and every person has two birthdays. One of your birthdays is the day you were born. The other is your NAME day. In other words, the day of your saint.
Saint Nicholas day is Dec 5, the Santa Claus night.
That night everyone puts out their best, very well cleaned shoes, usually on a window sill. Then, if they have been good, in the morning St. Nich has filled the shoes with treats, if not, then a switch! And the 6th is the present giving day.
The 21st of December, also Winter Solstice, is thought be the real day Jesus was born, at 7 p.m. That night is a ceremony where 12 white candles are lit. Then on the 25th they have a family dinner celebration.
Pretty cool blend of the various traditions.
You can see that the jury was undecided about my shoes :-)
A lovely note from the travelling Bard himself a few days ago. to wish you all a Very Merry Holiday Season.
Hungarian Christmas
Another lovely Hungarian Christmas tradition are these candies. They are quite large, with delicious chocolates of different types inside the wrappers. As you can see, they are available in great quantities, and people buy handfuls of them.
They are usually hung individually on hooks on the Christmas Tree, making lovely, twinkling ornaments. Ideally they are left until Christmas Day to eat.
HOWEVER, children (and quite often adults too) cannot wait. So they carefully take down the candy, unwrap it, the close the wrapper so it looks like the candy is still in it, then rehang on the tree!
Come Christmas Day everyone ends up grabbing empty wrappers - all done in good fun and merriment.