For five years in the UAE, I put up with clueless non-Americans trick-or-treating on Halloween without costumes. I smiled through my teeth and gave them candy even though they were doing it wrong. And today, I think karma came back to reward us, because WE were the clueless foreigners doing it slightly wrong, and the cultural experts indulged us.
Palm Sunday in Finland brings with it an interesting tradition of children decorating willow branches with feathers and fabric, dressing up as witches, and knocking on doors to perform a good luck spell in return for candy.
We didn't have witch costumes, so the girls dressed up in pretty dresses instead (that's how we got it slightly wrong). But they decorated some legit willow branches and memorized the chant in Finnish, and our neighbors were very forgiving. The best part was that I think we caught some of them off guard, so they had to raid their personal stash of sweets, yielding goodies like Toblerone instead of your run-of-the-mill chocolate eggs.
This holiday was a little like Halloween in that you knocked on a door in costume and got candy, but a little different in that the number of doors you visited was limited by the number of willow branches you had. After you say the spell, you hand over the willow branch, so you can't knock on doors endlessly. The girls only had four willow sticks total, so we only got candy from four people. But that was plenty.
Easter was always a hard holiday to prop up on my own in the UAE, not least because it was always a workday there. I'm glad to have some support from society at large here as we head into this important Easter week!
Here are the girls in their finery and a video of Magda reciting the "spell."
