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by Marja-Leena by Marja-Leena cherry blossoms & snow
A new cultural event taking place right now in Vancouver is the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, a celebration of the 36,000 cherry trees in the city’s parks, boulevards, and private gardens, more than in any other Canadian city. According to the short history of our trees, these have been planted over a period of sixty years.
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
How about the snow we’ve been having on and off since Wednesday? A strange mix of weather patterns has brought us windstorms, rainstorms, overnight freezing temperatures, sleet and snow, and sunny warm periods of melting snow, and repeats of that cycle! Snow is rather unusual out here on the West Coast in March except on the mountains. I love snow, especially when it comes down in thick fluffy flakes, but not in March! Our only other snowfall this winter was back in November, but it’s been a long cold wet winter. I’ve been longing for warm dry weather to get out in the garden. We’ll see how the cherry blossoms have fared through this snow when we go into town tomorrow.
by Marja-Leena WOMAN
(image scanned from invitation – designed by Andrew Cairns)
WOMAN is an art exhibition in celebration of International Women’s Day at the Ferry Building Gallery, 1414 Argyle Ave, in West Vancouver, BC. The opening reception is tonight, Tuesday, March 7th, 6-8 pm. The exhibition continues to March 26th, 2006 – Hours: 10-6pm Tuesday – Sunday
Thirty-three artists’ works are featured, including that of Jean Morrison.
I admit I’m not much of an activist but I like this kind of event to recognize women! International Women’s Day is on March 8th and is celebrated in Canada from March 5th to 11th, 2006.
ADDENDUM: On a related and very interesting note, haihatus, a Finnish artist’s blog, has reminded me that women in Finland have had the right to vote for 100 years as of this year! Finland was not yet an independent country one hundred years ago, but a duchy of Russia. Here’s some of that history.*
(*Link expired and deleted)
by Marja-Leena Valentines
Happy Valentine’s Day to all my readers! If you are in Finland, I wish you Hauskaa Ystävänpäivää! (That means Happy Friends’ Day, which I just learned about and like very much!)
Because my birthday is so close to Valentine’s, we celebrate the two at once. Instead of red roses, I received a beautiful white phalaenopsis orchid to add to my growing collection! My husband loves giving me these because they last such a long time and I love them (and him!) too.
Mirabilis has a couple of out-of-the-ordinary stories about this day:
Ancient Rome waited until March 1st
Valentines from ancient Rome.
Later: Don’t you just love this photo from National Geographic ?!
by Marja-Leena Gung Hay Fat Choi!
Happy New Year, that is the Chinese Lunar Year!
… old debts will be settled, new clothes purchased and homes cleaned and decorated to ring in the New Year with a fresh start. Families gather on the eve of the holiday, which lands on a Saturday this year, to hold a large feast and honour their ancestors. Over the following two weeks, people visit friends and relatives, bringing gifts of sweets, fruits and red envelopes stuffed with money. People also visit fortunetellers to seek insight into what the new year will hold. While many of the traditional customs are no longer commonly practised here in Canada, it remains a time for family gatherings and gift-giving. (more in the Vancouver Sun)
The greater Vancouver area has the third-largest Asian population in North America, after San Francisco and New York. More than 400,000 ethnic Chinese live in British Columbia. Many Chinese-Canadians fly to their homeland for the Lunar New Year, which typically begins with the new moon and ends two weeks later with the full moon.
Vancouver’s Chinese cultural history began with the 1858 British Columbia gold rush and the subsequent building of the trans-continental railway in the 19th century. Those workers and their descendants built Chinatown just east of what is now downtown Vancouver.
This year’s 2-hour parade starts at noon Sunday and winds through Chinatown, chiefly on Pender and Keefer streets. Its headquarters site is at Chinatown Plaza (180 Keefer St.), where events continue until 4 p.m. (from the Bellingham Herald)
Here’s a list of special events in Vancouver and Richmond. (Richmond is a suburb south of Vancouver and has become a kind of modern Chinatown with the more recent immigrants.)
And these are interesting: about Chinese calligraphy and leslee’s great links on this Year of the Fire Dog – my year, too!
(The image above is of an exquisite Chinese paper-cut given to me as a gift once – I know, it’s supposed to be a dog this year, but I didn’t have one! No cultural offence intended.)
by Marja-Leena Isabel Bayrakdarian in Armenia
Last Thursday evening we decided to do a rare thing and watch TV, specifically CBC’s Opening Night which featured A Long Journey Home.
This is a beautifully filmed and spiritually moving documentary that follows Armenian-Canadian operatic soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian on her emotional first visit to her ancestral homeland. Her journey takes her from Yerevan, the modern capital, along an ancient silk road to churches and ruins tucked away in Armenia’s remote mountain regions. As the first country to embrace Christianity Armenia has the oldest Christian churches in the world.
Isabel Bayrakdarian is becoming an expert on the music of Armenia’s iconic composer, Gomidas or Komitas (1869-1935) who collected and preserved thousands of ancient Armenian folk songs before the genocide of 1915. In addition to the folk music, Komitas arranged a great deal of sacred music. So it was that she sang many of his compositions in several churches and ruins, sometimes accompanied by a girls’ choir or an adult one, or by a marvelous duduk quartet.
I particularly loved the ancient church she visited which was carved completely out of the rock of a mountainside (possibly Geghard Monastery?). I connected with her immense awe over this “living ancient” rock and when she sang in here with her glorious voice, the wonderful acoustics made me shiver.
Sometimes her singing made me remember the haunting music of the Romanys who travelled the Silk Road as so powerfully and movingly presented in the film Latcho Drom.
And all through A Long Journey Home, we kept recalling the film Ararat by Atom Egoyan that we watched over a year ago and in which, in fact, she sang some of the background music.
This CBC-TV production is available as a DVD for those who might be interested – I highly recommend it! Do read this recent interview and article in Globe and Mail’s Engineering News of all places! Can you find out why? (I’m not sure how long this link will remain active.)
Addendum Feb.15,2006: I just came across these excellent photos of sacred sites in Armenia
by Marja-Leena Twelfth Day
Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas (and my true love gave to me…!). A year ago, I learned that the Twelfth Day of Christmas is on the sixth day of January which is Epiphany (or Loppianen in Finnish). Traditionally in Finland (and Denmark, I’ve just been told) this signals the end of Christmas and the decorations come down. We still have all our Christmas decorations and tree up in honour of our good friends from Denmark, who arrived Wednesday for a week’s visit. We are having lots of fun catching up and being tourists, so the decorations will be up until they leave. That’s unusually late for us, but it’s in keeping with our festive mood and is a wonderful way to hold back winter’s darkness and dreary rain a bit longer.
A big welcome back also to mirabilis after a long absence! Read her timely and interesting post on Epiphany and Befana.
And for Finnish readers, Anita Konkka discusses Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
by Marja-Leena Happy New Year!
It is the sixth day of Christmas and tonight is New Year’s Eve. We have been busy getting ready for friends from Victoria coming for this weekend, and friends from Denmark coming next week. What a great way to end the old year and begin the New Year!
Dear Readers, I wish you all a New Year of Happiness, Good Health and Abundant Creativity! Hauskaa Uutta Vuotta! Bonne année! Allen ein frohes Neues Jahr!
(Image: detail from Silent Messengers: Hoodoos IV)
by Marja-Leena Boxing Day
Boxing Day is a public holiday observed in many Commonwealth countries on 26 December. In many European countries including Finland it is also a holiday, called St Stephen’s Day (Tapaninpäivä in Finnish) or the Second Day of Christmas.
According to one theory, the name originates from the tradition of opening the alms boxes placed in churches during the Christmas period. After Christmas, the donations collected in these boxes were distributed to poor people. Another theory mentions that it was a custom among members of the merchant class to give boxes of food stuffs to servants the day after Christmas, as an expression of gratitude for their work.
In most European countries today, shops are closed. A designated holiday in Canada as well, all stores used to be closed like on Christmas Day. As a child, I remember the big family dinners at a different home every night from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, and again New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. As new immigrants, we all lived in tiny homes, so we were crowded but very festive and warm.
But since the prevalence of Sunday shopping Boxing Day has become the biggest shopping SALE day of the year for most retailers. Many years ago we occasionally did do a bit of shopping on this day, but we have since had no desire to partake in this frenzy. Pity the people who have to work in the stores today instead of being home with their families. In the USA it is also a huge sale day though the term Boxing Day is unheard of.
Also today, the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004 is being commemorated around the world.
Wishing everyone a good peaceful day!