Romanians Celebrated Christmas

With low budgets at their disposal and worried about the future, most people chose to spend their two days off at home with their family, as Christmas coincided with the weekend. Since this year Christmas trees were sold at prohibitively high prices for medium budgets, they were replaced with plastic replicas or symbolic twigs.

In the countryside, where Christmas traditions have endured unaltered to a large extent, pigs were ritually sacrificed and traditional Christmas meals were cooked on that occasion. Carol-singers visited people’s houses, bringing the blessed news of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. In Bucharest and other cities, local town halls organized popular festivities. Locals in Pitesti, southern Romania, were offered over 5,000 cabbage rolls and polenta and dozens of gallons of plum brandy – two Romanian-traditional products – on behalf of the local authorities. In Daia village, central Romania, boys’ groups went caroling to unmarried girls’ homes.

The Romanian media on Monday writes about how some Romanians spent their Christmas in an inventive fashion. Some attended the masked ball party in Timisoara, where this year’s theme was inspired from Alexandre Dumas’s novels.

Others, in search of adventure, spent Christmas day at the rock bar of the ice hotel in the Carpathians mountains, located at an altitude of 2,500 meters, or at Nicolae Ceausescu’s hunting lodge. And since discounts are quite fashionable in Romania, many were tempted to buy package Christmas or New Year’s Eve parties.

Moreover, many have zeroed in on charity acts, especially focusing on families with many children or people with disabilities on this particular occasion. The Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church Daniel called for both financial support for the building of the People’s Cathedral in Bucharest as well as for other humanitarian initiatives. In 2009, the Romanian Patriarchy carried out 10.6 million euros worth of projects, which resulted in the foundation of 49 social institutions, such as rest homes for elders, soup kitchens and social bakehouses, medical centers and sickbays.

A Forbes Romania top has designated the Romanian Patriarchy and the Catholic Archbishopric of Romania as the two leading charity organizations in the country. The two institutions have over eight hundred thousand beneficiaries, eleven thousand employees, winding a yearly overall budget of 24 million euros.