Nouveau traditions

Since moving to Finland our family has acquired some new traditions, some are quite nice and others come out of the necessity to stay sane.

One more annoying one is the ringing early in the morning on Palmsunday, at lest according to the offspring. Some of our neighbourhood's kids are quite early risers and that annoys the most our offspring who would like to stay in bed late. Currently the new tradition is to remember to remove the doorbells cover in order to avoid it from making the ringing noise it produces with the cover on before entering bed early in the morning, or late in the night, depending on how you look at it.

I guess this would normally mean no harm, we would just have less kids ringing on the door, but it does not erase the knocks on the door which I find more annoying. Palmsunday, which is the Sunday before Easter and was last Sunday, is the day for kids to go out and collect sweets going from door to door the neighbourhood all day long and doing a few re-rounds if only possible to the good places they got the best treats.

This particular Sunday it causes us a bit of discomfort with the doorbell out of function as we had some friends coming over for dinner, and them having left home without a mobile phone in order to stay out of touch in order to be off duty we did not know they were behind the door ringing the dysfunctional doorbell. Took a while for them to come to think of the old fashioned but for so many centuries functional way of knocking on the door instead of the ringing wonders of the modern world. Or maybe they were just hungry?

Anyway, today is long Friday, actually not the longest day of the year, that is midsummer’s night this year, right on the dot in the almanac where it should be. Today is the other day of the year when the day and night are equally long. So up from this day there should be a difference to the days really getting longer and longer.

And that not just in the biblical sense.