Unique Holy Spirit Celebrations

                                                      

                                               Feast of the Holy Spirit

  About two kilometers from my village, there is a village called Espírito Santo (Holy Spirit), in which there is a celebration with a unique tradition in the country. This festival has a whole litter made in pine nuts called "branch".

   It's a party that needs a lot of hand labour throughout the year. The party is of religious content, during the time of Pentecost ("Pentecost" is the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles who were gathered for the first time, waiting for the Holy Spirit, inspiring all of their work in the Church), usually in the month April or May, depending on Easter day. It's a party like any other, with Mass followed by procession, folklore evening, the streets with the tents of fritters, snacks and drinks, street vendors, artists (Portuguese singers), pipers, music band, fireworks and dances. But what attracts the visitors is undoubtedly the traditional "branch" that is made of pine nuts and integrates the procession. It is the pride of the people of the Holy Spirit. No one knows for certain the age or the origin of the branch but it surely is more than two hundred years old.

   On all Saints Day, November 1, a group of people starts looking for pine nuts in the area of pine forests. As pine trees are scarce in the county of Soure, people widen the search to Condeixa and Penela area where there are a lot of pine trees. For three or four weeks, people move through the respective tractors with trailers, equipped with ladders and with some agility they climb the pine trees and harvest the pine cones. Normally this operation is carried out on Sundays as it is a day of rest for most people. It takes about three tons of pine cones, then they are stored in a shed protected from moisture so that they can dry up to Christmas. On the day of the Kings (6th January) another stage is initiated – they open the cones to remove the pine nuts.

   In threshing they extend pine leaves layers with another layer of cones, and so on. They set it on the fire so that the cones can open with heat to remove the sprockets. Sometimes even then some cones are not open, so it is necessary to put them on top of a stump, give a blow with the wooden mallet to open them. The next task involves joining all cones and having a lot of people (friends and relatives of party-goers) to "cascabulhar", ie removing the nuts of pine cones, and putting the nuts in the "tarara" to separate the pine nuts (tarara is an agricultural implement to separate the seeds, corn or olive leaves), which is a time consuming job. To prepare the "branch" people need around forty "bushels" of pine nuts, which is equivalent to four liters

    Bushel is an old measure of capacity used especially for cereals. After a deserved stop a new task begins in February. Men armed with hammers start to break pine nuts, and women separate the brown film that surrounds it. It is a painstaking job that leaves pretty clean pine nuts, another group armed with needles and thread and a good vision and great care should be carried out to "threading", ie drill the pine nut by the edges to thread with about 1.20 meters topped with a knot at each end containing 1.00 meters. On average for every Sunday afternoon people make 100 pitches in a total of 900 needed to decorate the branch.

    Each thread takes about 300 pine nuts, and the whole operation takes twelve Sundays. There are several people who know how to prepare the branch but tradition dictates only one person preparing the litter without any help. We are only missing the horseshoe-shaped cakes baked in wood stove. In celebration of the end pine nuts are divided by the population that contributes to the party. The story goes that when there is no one to grab the "branch" it is buried in the cemetery and this tradition ends, which to this day never happened.

                                                    Festival programme

The branch leaves the house of the butlers

                                                               Branch in church

                                                                            

                                                                          Pine nuts