Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday in Lent. It is customary to vasit one's mother on that day. Mother ought to be given a present - tea, flowers or a simnel cake. It is possible to buy the cake, they are sold in every confectionery. But it is preferrable to make it at home. The way Mothering Sunday is celebrated has much in common with the International Women's Day celebration in Russia.

Good Friday is the first Friday before Easter. It is the day when all sorts of taboos on various works are in force. Also it is a good day for shifting beers, for sowing potatoes, peas, beans, parsley, and pruning rose trees. Good Friday brings the once sacred cakes, the famous Hot Cross buns. These must be spiced and the dough marked with a cross before baking.

Eggs, chickens, rabbits and flowers are all symbols of new life. Chocolate and fruit cake covered with marzipan show that fasting is over. Wherever Easter is celebrated, there Easter eggs are usually to be found. In England, just as in Russia, Easter is a time for giving and receiving of presents that traditionally take the form of an Easter egg. Easter egg is a real hard-boiled egg dyed in bright colors or decorated with some elaborate pattern. Coloring and decorating eggs for Easter is a very ancient custom. Many people, however, avoid using artificial dyes and prefer to boil eggs with the outer skin of an onion, which makes the eggs shells yellow or brown. In fact, the color depends on the amount of onion skin added. In ancient times they used many different natural dyes fir the purpose. The dyes were obtained mainly from leaves, flowers and bark.

At present Easter eggs are also made of chocolate, sugar, metals, wood, ceramics and other materials at hand. They may differ in size, ranging from enormous to tiny, no bigger than a robin's egg. Easter Sunday is solemnly celebrated in London. Each year the capital city of Britain greets the spring with a spectacular Easter Parade in Battersea Park. The great procession, or parade, begins at 3 p.m. The parade consists of many decorated floats, entered by various organizations in and outside London. Some of the finest bands in the country take part in the parade. At the rear of the parade is usually the very beautiful float richly decorated with flowers. It is called the Jersey one because the spring flowers bloom early on the Island of Jersey.

In England, children rolled eggs down hills on Easter morning, a game has been connected to the rolling away of the rock from Jesus Christ's tomb then He was resurrected. British settlers brought this custom to the New World. It consists of rolling coloured, hardboiled egg down a slope until they are cracked and broken after whish they are eaten by their owners. In some districts this is a competitive game, the winner being the player whose egg remains longest undamaged, but more usually, the fun consists simply of the rolling and eating.

Harvest

Corn Dollies

Many countries seem to have had a similar custom to the British one of making a design from the last sheaf of corn to be harvested. In Britain a corn dolly is created by plaiting the wheat stalks to create a straw figure. The corn dolly is kept until the Spring. This is because people believed that the corn spirit lived in the wheat and as the wheat was harvested, the spirit fled to the wheat which remained. By creating the corn dolly the spirit is kept alive for the next year and the new crop. Sometimes the corn dolly is hung up in the barn, sometimes in the farmhouse, and sometimes in the church. In Spring the corn dolly would be ploughed back into the soil. There are many types of corn dolly.

The story of John Barleycorn

A story to the corn dolly is to be found in the folksong John Barleycorn. Three men swear that John Barleycorn must die. They take a plough and bury him alive. But the Spring comes and John rises through the soil. After a while he grows big and strong, even growing a beard, so the three men cut him down at the knee, tie him on to a cart, beat him, strip the flesh off his bones and grind him between two stones. But at the end it is John Barleycorn who defeats his opponents, proving the stronger man, by turning into beer.

Harvest Festivals

In churches all over Britain there are services to thank God for the Harvest. As part of these services local people bring baskets of fruit and vegetables to decorate the church. The produce is then distributed to the poor.

Halloween

The word itself, "Halloween," actually has its origins in the Catholic Church. It comes from a contracted corruption of All Hallows Eve. November 1, "All Hollows Day" (or "All Saints Day"), is a Catholic day of observance in honor of saints. But, in the 5th century BC, in Celtic Ireland, summer officially ended on October 31. The holiday was called Samhain (sow-en), the Celtic New year.

One story says that, on that day, the disembodied spirits of all those who had died throughout the preceding year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. It was believed to be their only hope for the afterlife. The Celts believed all laws of space and time were suspended during this time, allowing the spirit world to intermingle with the living.

Naturally, the still-living did not want to be possessed. So on the night of October 31, villagers would extinguish the fires in their homes, to make them cold and undesirable. They would then dress up in all manner of ghoulish costumes and noisily paraded around the neighborhood, being as destructive as possible in order to frighten away spirits looking for bodies to possess.

Probably a better explanation of why the Celts extinguished their fires was not to discourage spirit possession, but so that all the Celtic tribes could relight their fires from a common source, the Druidic fire that was kept burning in the Middle of Ireland, at Usinach.

Some accounts tell of how the Celts would burn someone at the stake who was thought to have already been possessed, as sort of a lesson to the spirits. Other accounts of Celtic history debunk these stories as myth. The Romans adopted the Celtic practices as their own. But in the first century AD, Samhain was assimilated into celebrations of some of the other Roman traditions that took place in October, such as their day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, which might explain the origin of our modern tradition of bobbing for apples on Halloween. The thrust of the practices also changed over time to become more ritualized. As belief in spirit possession waned, the practice of dressing up like hobgoblins, ghosts, and witches took on a more ceremonial role.

The custom of Halloween was brought to America in the 1840's by Irish immigrants fleeing their country's potato famine. At that time, the favorite pranks in New England included tipping over outhouses and unhinging fence gates.