Butter week and the end of winter

The week before Lent is spent eating dairy, receiving visitors and going visiting. The structure is entirely explained by what comes next.

Why it exists in this form

Meat is already given up; dairy and eggs are not, and after this week they will be, for seven weeks. A household with butter, cheese, milk and eggs in early spring has to use them, because they will not keep through the fast.

The festival is therefore a solution to a storage problem, dressed as a celebration. That is not a cynical reading; it is how most food traditions work.

What is eaten

In much of Ukraine, varenyky with cheese, served with sour cream, rather than the pancakes more associated with the tradition further north. Both appear, and which dominates is regional.

Quantities are not modest and the point is not moderation.

The visiting

The week has a structure of who visits whom on which day, with particular emphasis on the relationship between a young couple and the wife's family. Sons-in-law and mothers-in-law feature prominently and so does the humour about them.

The last day

Forgiveness Sunday, on which people ask forgiveness of one another before the fast begins. The formula is fixed and the answer is fixed, and it is asked of family, neighbours and colleagues.

Whatever one thinks of the theology, a culture with an annual scheduled occasion for saying sorry to everybody has built something useful.

Then it stops

The transition is abrupt by design: excess, then a formal apology, then seven weeks of restraint. The week makes sense only as the first half of that pair.

That it is this abundant precisely because a long fast follows made complete sense to me — what is about to be given up is consumed first. We have a similar week and it works on the same logic. That it then stops is the important part: an abundance with a defined end is what makes it an abundance.