Adventures in Azerbaijan: The Pre-Holiday of All Pre-Holidays

This week was the fourth and final pre-holiday before Novruz (which actually starts tonight!), which means it was like a mega pre-holiday (I'd say it might even qualify as a holiday...but the term here is pre-holiday, so I won't fight that). From what I hear, it was just kind of like a warm-up for what will start tonight and we will do way more of a lot of the things we did a little bit of already.

To try to explain some of the traditions, I should start by saying that Novruz has some parts that make it a strange combination of our Halloween and Easter. For example, instead of Trick or Treating, we go around "throwing our hats" at people's houses. This means that we creep up to their door, put our hat (as in like a winter hat, I didn't see any baseball cap types, but I don't think you would be turned away for that or anything) by the door, knock, and run away. The owner of the house then has to open the door and fill your hat with sweets. I'm not going to lie, I do find it a little bit of a strange idea to put delicious, sticky paxlava (baklava) - one of the Azeri national sweets - in a winter hat where it is going to become covered in lots of little fibers, so I did my best to get my paxlava out of my hat as quickly as possible and into my plastic bag....and then put the hat back on my head? Again, not the most sanitary of holidays, but really, I'm not complaining as people were giving me lots of free paxlava, and what's better than free paxlava? So that's the Halloween part. Oh, and there is also this little song that we as hat-throwers were supposed to sing, but I don't really know when that was supposed to happen as we were hiding once the hats were thrown and then by the time we came out of hiding, we already had the goods, so it wasn't like they could be held hostage by the homeowner until we sang. But I did have to learn it while walking from house to house even though we never performed it for reals. And then for the Easter part, they color eggs like we do, but instead of hiding them like us, they fight with them (hey now, it's no less logical than hiding the things around your house, now is it?). Here's how the battle goes down: two people each have eggs, one person takes their egg and whacks it against the other person's, if your egg cracks you must give it to the other person. If you are a good egg cracker, you will soon have a lot of hardboiled eggs, a real treat. Unfortunately, I am not good at this egg fighting thing. I have yet to win...but give me some credit, we only fought with 2 eggs repeatedly so far (and in the end my student gave them both to me anyway out of pity haha), and I'm hoping to have better luck now that the big holiday is here.

There are some parts of the last pre-holiday that are apparently only on that day and we won't repeat them at the main event. One of those is that people go around eavesdropping at their neighbors' houses. The idea is that if you hear them say good things, you will have a good year (Novruz is a kind of New Year celebration). When I was going out to do my listening, I realized that this was going to be a little difficult for me as I still have trouble understanding people who are actually speaking TO me, let alone when I'm struggling to hear them through a door. Lucky for me, my people were watching TV and all I had to translate was a laugh. Pretty standard. Laughing = Good things. Yessss.

In preparation for all these pre-holidays, we have done some cooking of sweets and my host mom has been making some dinners that are a bit more special than usual, but now that the real deal is here, we've been pulling out all the stops. We have been in baking overdrive at my house for basically this entire week. I learned how to make şəkərbura (one of the national sweets) a few weeks ago, so those skills were tested, and I was also taught how to make paxlava. The whole process was made a little more difficult by the fact that we lost power in the middle of our preparations and then had to bring our paxlava to a house in the neighboring village to bake it because the power didn't come back on for about 18 hours (stupid windy day), but I can tell you after extensive taste-testing that although we were a little worried about it, our paxlava came out just fine in the end. Phew. I think the şəkərbura are also fine, but I haven't eaten any of them yet. I'm definitely more of a paxlava fan. I'm going to assume that most of you know what paxlava is, but that you probably don't know şəkərbura (pronounced "shekerbura"). They are half-circle shaped cookie things that are filled with a mixture of sugar and grated nuts. It's actually the same nut/sugar mixture that we use for paxlava (some old xanam was really smart when she created these treats because she saved everyone a lot of work by making the two most popular sweets have the same ingredients! Even the dough is the same! Making them together is a snap).

Alright, I have to rush home before my family gets cranky that I'm spending too much time away from home just before the holiday, but to all of you bayramınız mübarək- happy holiday!