New Year is the favourite and most anticipated celebration in Armenia, and among all New Year traditions the most important ones are those of cooking special food and decorating the table. The traditional Armenian New Year’s dish is ham, and everybody starts New Year preparations a week before the date.
The ham is put into a salt solution for a couple of days and then it is marinated for 3-7 days, in accordance with grandma’s recipes and each hostess’s experience. Back in the Soviet era there was a tradition of baking a whole hoglet to demonstrate a family’s wealth and prosperity.
Not a single table can do without traditional Armenian dolma (a dish of meat and rice wrapped up in vine leaves) or its Lenten version. Other popular hot dishes are trout and turkey cooked, like the ham, with oranges, apples and almonds.Some dishes that have become traditional ones have Slavic roots, pancakes for example. The New Year table is usually filled with all sorts of dishes of foreign as well as Armenian origin. Traditional drinks are champagne, wine, vodka and cognac, but ‘foreign’ rum or martini are now common too. And of course Armenian housewives often surprise their guests with homemade beverages. Fruits are also traditional for the festive table – a really old custom, as ancient Armenian New Year – Navsad – was a harvest festival. There is a saying that you’ll live the year just like you greet it, so people try to make New Year celebrations abundant and happy.
The tradition of visiting friends and especially elderly family members by young people still exists among Armenian people. Armenia has adopted the European habit of decorating a Christmas tree, but it is hasn’t yet acquired the habit of celebrating the occasion with the fireworks and mass festivities that bring a lot of people close to each other in many European countries.
Susanna Petrosyan, Yerevan, exclusively to VK
