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In the meantime, all the households start to prepare the holiday table – tsitu pigigh, banurhouts, zilibig, bourmou, aghounts…Dried fruits, nuts, vodka and wine are brought from the underground cellars. The boys bring the burnt laurel branches home and fashion canes from them. On the tips they will fasten bags to collect their New Year’s gift. This is probably the only holiday of the year when all the members of the family, regardless of age or sex) gather round a modest holiday table and make merry until the morning. At midnight, the sexton of the village church announces the New Year. Feasting and visitations continue until dusk. The boys go from house to house for djanta keril (throwing of gift bag). They’d knock on each door, shove the branch with the bag on the tip, and wait for it to be filled with dried fruit, nuts and sweets. Oftentimes, they would lower the bags down the chimney. Sometimes, witty household members would place burning embers in one of the bags as a naughty joke. The young people, in camouflage clothes, would enter houses cracking joke and just being foolish. The laughter elicited would be repaid in drink and food.
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