Music I am going to talk to you about Güntillämpäivä today,
Which is the Finnish version of Imbolg slash Candelmas.
So all of my viewers who celebrate Imbolg or Candelmas,
Blessed Imbolg and Candelmas,
Or back in Tördävä.
If I start with Imbolg,
I guess most of you viewers know that Imbolg is originally a druidic festival to celebrate Goddess Bridget.
It's an Irish festival of light.
Bridget,
She is the Goddess of the Sun,
Goddess of life,
Goddess of fire and inspiration,
Motherhood and all kinds of cool things.
So that is Imbolg.
And then also around Europe there are different celebrations taken this time of the year between the 1st and the 2nd of February.
And usually they are related to Gods and Goddesses who represent fertility or sun and life and new life.
So then when the people started to be converted into Christianity in the early middle ages,
That is when priests,
The church created a celebration of their own called Candelmas.
And with Candelmas people just wanted to convert the pagans to Christianity.
So when Imbolg was the celebration pagan festival of light,
Now it just became Christian slash Catholic festival of light.
And that's what Candelmas literally means,
A mess where you light up candles.
So anyway,
This celebration,
The pagan version,
It did not necessarily exist in Finland before Christianity arrived.
We don't have any kind of written records of people celebrating Gütte lam Bayba before it arrived in its Christian form,
But it is really possible that people somehow celebrated sun and the light coming back in February.
But we don't really have any kind of written records about this.
So when Finland was converted into Catholicism from Pagans,
That happened in the early middle ages.
Finland was still back then part of Sweden.
The King of Sweden,
The last abiding King whose name I cannot again remember,
When he was converted into Catholicism,
That is when all these Catholic holidays also arrived to Finland.
But the thing is with Candelmas,
That did not only bring the Christian aspect and ways to celebrate for the pagan folk,
It also brought the pagan aspects that already existed in the original pagan holiday because Candelmas is really based on in bulk and different versions of it around Europe.
So that is how Gütte lam Bayba arrived to Finland,
Both Christian and pagan elephants.
So February in Finnish is Helmi ku,
Which means a month of pearls.
Isn't that pretty?
Helmi is a pearl in Finnish and the name comes from that in February in Finland,
The snow,
It shines,
It shimmers and glitters when the sun beams,
Touch it.
They look like tiny pearls.
The snow is starting to melt a little bit.
So that is where the name Helmi ku comes,
Which means the prairie.
I thought that was really pretty.
But the thing is,
Even though we don't have written information that people did or didn't celebrate this pagan version before it arrived,
The Candelmas arrived to Finland.
But we do have stories how around February in Lapland and in Finland,
The people,
The first sun beam started to arrive and the sun was seen in the sky at least.
For one moment,
People they gathered to big groups and they went to a very wide space in two eyes or to the beach that was all snowy or to the fields to see the sun,
The little glimpses of the sun and welcome back the sun.
And in Lapland,
There are stories that people actually took lots of like pans and katos and trums and went to the sun to keep lots of noise because they were so happy that the sun was coming back.
So I think that is the way people did celebrate in bulk in Finland back in the pagan times.
And of course in Finland we have a time period called Kamos,
Which starts in October and ends in February and it means that the more north you go in Finland the less you can see the sun and it's dark 24 7.
It's like I'm from northern Finland and when I was a kid when I went to school in December it was dark,
When I got back from school it was dark again.
So summer's out when I was having lunch time pretty much.
And it's the same with the summer,
It's the land of the midnight sun because sun doesn't go down at all so it's the same thing.
So in that sense celebrating in bulk in Finland has been very different compared to other parts of Europe in that sense.
And also,
Sorry,
Reading my notes here,
And that of course it depended a lot which part of the country you live in.
And Finland is quite a wide country.
And like the whole symbolism that like here in Britain is connected to Bridget and in Wales and in Ireland like snow drops and lamps and sheeps and getting ready to start farming and all that.
We didn't have that in Finland in the pagan times obviously because it was still snowy and if you go to Mornod in Finland the snow really starts to melt around April.
So it really has been very different.
I guess that's why I really like spent February and March here because I really love seeing all the flowers coming up because in Finland I would have to wait until May before the flowers start to pop up.
So it's quite nice.
So there was these superstitions related to Ginteri or Gintenantide which means the day of the candle and one of these was that people should not do any kind of housework when it was Gintenantide.
You can ask if this was a Christian belief or pagan belief.
I guess it was both.
It was better to bring bad luck to do housework around that day.
Men weren't allowed to knit or sew or weave and men were not allowed to make very hard works like chop firewood or anything.
People were supposed to relax and take it easy which sounds very good.
Some typical foods for Gintenantide were candle porridge or light porridge,
Different kinds of soups and then people ate lots of fatty foods,
Fat foods.
I think that's quite common in Finland especially around winter time.
They ate lots of meat.
There was one very interesting superstition or pagan belief that I found.
That was to get the ash from the sauna and place the ash and then cover the,
Take the,
I'm forgetting the words,
Wool from the sheeps and then paint the cover of the skin of the sheeps with that ash after the ash had been blessed.
It was believed that when people did this the sheeps would stay very healthy.
I really like that and of course sheep it is also one symbol of a bridge.
But I think the sheeps overall they are very connected to spring anyway no matter where you are.
So this was the story of Gintenantide in Finnish pagan wheel of the year.
So blessed in bulk and candle mass and Gintenantide to all of you.
I'll see you on my next video.
Bye bye.
