Before Christmas, housewives start reparations for Christmas.
Preparations include cleaning the house, dusting, shining, arranging furniture, baking rusks, and painting the inner and outer walls white.
They used to mix paint with whitewash, so as to achieve the traditional with colour to the walls.
On Christmas Day, people go to church. After Divine Service, people receive communion, which is known in the Cypriot dialect as “paskazo”. After Mass is over, people exchange wishes.
After church people go home and gather around the table in a happy, family atmosphere to eat chicken and soup or “traxana” soup, which is a traditional dish.
New Year’s customs
On New Year’s Eve, housewives prepare the New Year’s pie and put a coin inside. The pie is eaten on New Year and who ever finds the coin is considered lucky all year round.
On New Year’s Day, people go to church and when the Service is over, they kiss and exchange wishes. According to old Cypriot customs when people return home from church on the first day of the year, they should enter with their right food so everything will go well during the New Year.
Epiphany Day
On Epiphany Day, housewives baked “kserotiana” or “loukoumades” which is a kind of doughnut. They used to throw some doughnuts on the houses’ roofs so bugbears, or else “kalikantzaroi”, would eat and leave.
After Mass, the village’s priest went around all the houses and sprinkled people with holy water. This custom is known as “Kalanta”. He was accompanied by a child who held the container with the holy water. All people would throw some coins in the container, as a gift to the priest. All children went around the houses singing, in order to gain some money, known as “ploumisma” in the Cypriot dialect.
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