What day?

Aunt Carol left an interesting comment under my last post, about a holiday called “Dyngus Day.” I had to look it up on Wikipedia, because I’ve probably been away from Buffalo long enough that even if I HAD known about it when I was a kid, it wasn’t something that lodged permanently in my brain. Dyngus Day, it turns out, is another name for Easter Monday – or the day after Easter. It’s not widely celebrated in the U.S., but it IS rather popular in Poland. And Buffalo has a very large Polish population, so it would stand to reason that Dyngus Day is a well-known holiday in Buffalo.

And Aunt Carol is right – in terms of bizarre behavior, I’d have to say Dyngus Day has Groundhog Day beat. Here are a few excerpts from Wikipedia:

In Poland, traditionally, boys will awaken girls early in the morning and douse them with water and strike them about the legs with long thin twigs or switches made from willow, birch, or decorated tree branches.

Oh, that is exactly the way I like to be awaken in the early morning – with a cold blast of water and a trip to the local minor emergency center for antibiotic salve. And the amazing thing is that this is not done out of malice or cruelty – no, this is what boys do to girls they LIKE. Here’s more of the article:

Later the focus shifted to the courting aspect of the ritual, and young unmarried girls were the only acceptable targets. A boy would sneak into the bedroom of the particular girl he fancied and awaken her by completely drenching her with multiple buckets of water. Politics played an important role in proceedings, and often the boy would get access to the house only by arrangement with the girl's mother.

Okay, I’ve heard of some unusual courting practices throughout different cultures, but this one is really strange. I mean, there aren’t many parents that will allow a guy to walk right into a girl’s bedroom while she’s sleeping, before the two of them have even solidified any sort of relationship. And there certainly aren’t many parents that will allow the same boy to walk into the bedroom with “multiple buckets of water.” I can’t imagine these poor girls enjoy the “festivities” on Dyngus Day, except for the apparent assurance of eventual marriage. In fact, the way this article makes it sound, if you DON’T have the privilege of being doused with water and beaten with switches, you might as well forget about ever saying “I do”:

Throughout the day, girls would find themselves the victims of drenchings and leg-whippings, and a daughter who wasn't targeted for such activities was generally considered to be beznadziejna (hopeless) in this very coupling-oriented environment.

And to think I’ve always wondered why Polish people are the target of so many jokes… :)