I am a little bit late on this, but this past week has been Maslenitsa in Russia, or blini week. It's a celebration of spring and fun and food, especially blini (thin buckwheat pancakes) and anything made with butter. It's also the week before Russian Orthodox Lent, so it's similar in some ways to Mardi Gras, but it has its own set of traditions and foods, and none of these involve beads or floats. Most of the traditions involve eating vast piles of blini.

Mmmm. Blini.

The word, Maslenitsa, comes from the Russian word for butter, maslo. Maslenitsa=butter week=blini week. Butter is yellow like the sun, blin are round like the sun, and the sun will finally be out in spring. So Maslenitsa is really a celebration of the spring to come. It has roots firmly in Russia's pagan past although it's also connected to Russian Orthodoxy. During Lent, rich foods and dairy products are avoided. Maslenitsa is one last culinary hurrah before the leaner time of Lent.

Hundreds of years ago, Maslenitsa was a holiday in which people dressed in their finest clothing, sometimes in costume. Vendors would line the streets selling wonderful foods, and the rich celebrated with masquerade balls and troika rides. Amusement parks were set up with ice slides, entertainment, and theater.

Other rituals helped chase away the winter doldrums. In the countryside, a man made of straw, representing winter, was often lit on fire as a way to say good-bye to the frigid temperature. For many people, Maslenitsa was a holiday of family and feasting. Every night of Maslenitsa was a night of plenty. Caviar, mushrooms, salted fish, honey, jam, cheese, salmon, or sour cream are served along with the blini, sweet and savory alike. Meat dishes are not part of the tradition, however, but anything else, the richer the better, was fair game for a blini accompaniment. And always, blini is washed down by vodka.

This year, Maslenitsa started on Feb. 28th and it runs through the 5th of March. I am not sure if this holiday is one that is still widely celebrated in Russia, although since it was a rural, ancient holiday and not primarily a religious one it was still celebrated even after the Revolution. I've read that some communities, like Suzdal, in the Vladimir region, and Ryazan, in the Ryazan region, still observe this holiday like their ancestors. According to this blog entry by the Accidental Russophile, it is celebrated in places like Moscow, too.