Hello to everyone! Today Ukrainians celebrate Palm (or Willow) Sunday, and you can see men and women, old and youth with willow branches in their hands today. Beautiful Ukrainian girls gladly take willow branches to churches to be blessed. Are you drenched today with some cold water? It’s Willow Sunday, when people coming out of the church are blessed with water and by tapping slightly one another with willow branches. It’s Willow Sunday, and it’s Easter in a week!
In fact, this Christian feast is called Palm Sunday. According to the Gospel, it is to commemorate Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. As you may know, while entering people honored Jesus Christ by waving palm branches as a symbol of peace. But climate differs, so in Ukraine palms were rather hard to get, they were expensive enough, and so in many other countries. That’s why palm branches were substituted with branches of pussy willow, olive, yew or boxwood, so the name of the feast accordingly differs – Willow or Box Sunday instead of Palm Sunday as well.
Ukrainian celebration of Willow Sunday is a charming and touching. People take branches of willows, sallows and osiers to be blessed by priests in churches during Sunday Mass. Coming home, they place these blessed branches behind icons. These pussy willows are believed to have some miraculous healing properties and bring health and wealth to home. The point is that willow was believed to be a holy tree in ancient pagan times; it had been one of the first blooming trees in spring. The Greek physician Hippocrates wrote about willow’ healing properties – its bark and leaves could heal fever and aches. So people believe that they could be healed and purified as well by tapping one another with pussy willow branches in order to protect from diseases. There are some ritual words people are lightly beaten with. Here are some of them:
“It’s not me hitting you, it’s a willow hitting you.
In a week it will be Easter, soon you will have a red egg” (it comes on pysankas, painted Easter eggs).
“You are beaten not by me but by the willow (to remind that Easter will be in a week)”.
“Be as tall as this willow, be as healthy as this water, and be as rich as the earth”.
All these words serve to wish for good luck and health, and you can see. But they remind that the following week would be a week of the severest Lent and getting ready for the Easter, the main Christian feast.