Drowning the madder

Though I'm living abroad some of our traditions should be still cultivated. Since it's a first day of spring today and the weather was nice, I went to the river to drown Marzanna - a doll symbolizing the winter in old polish custom. I was accompanied by Marieke and Eric, who happily joined my quest and wanted to trake part in the polish pagan practice.

For the execution place we choosed one of the bridges. While me and Marieke were trying to set the doll on fire, Eric was on the lookout. After all playing with an open fire is not well seen by the police... Especially not on the bridge above the busy water route. There's really a lot of different ships passing by all the time. For example such a ship filled with coal. It would be quite spectacular if our madder would fall on something like this. Relax, we are not crazy or stupid. We did not stand on the middle of the bridge. The whole action took place close to the riverbank where nothing is floating. Maybe except few ducks. 

My hand-made madder didn't want to burn

I can see some smoke ;)

The would be a big bonfire if our burning madder would land on one of these piles of coal

It was really windy out there (as usually in Holland), so the burning part didn't go smoothly. The doll was resisting the fire and we were struggling with the matches. But we finally made it. As an originator and the custom expert I had the honor of throwing the Ms. Winter to the wild water of the Waal river. 

At the end of our accomplished mission we could raise a toast with a sparkling wine from a plastic cups and admire the view of the city from the other side of the river. Sitting there on a beach, joking and looking for the remains of Marzanna, we celebrated the coming of the Spring.