Knitting Galore: Sugar 'n' Spice and All things Nice

HELLO

Hi there, welcome to my blog! and thankyou for stopping by. I have designed this blog to share with you knitting patterns that are my favourites and, i'll be trying out some new ones along the way. I also hope to help knitters new and old (i don't mean your age LOL) by sharing information, handy hints and tips, answering quieries and helping solve your knitting problems. Before you go, please help me by making a comment and suggest any knitting project you'd like to see.

Thanks again. Have a nice day!

Dianne

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Sugar 'n' Spice and All things Nice

Today was the start of Ramazan Bayramı which is the three-day holiday that follows the end of the holy month of Ramazan. Called Eid es-Seghir in many other Muslim countries, Ramazan Bayramı, sometimes called Şeker Bayramı or "Candy Holiday" starts at sunset on the last day of Ramadam or Ramazan as its called here in Turkey and celebrates the completion of the holy month of fasting. Fasting in Ramadan teaches people to get ready for the bad days (like wars, food or water shortage etc.) and helps them understand how the poor people feel when they have hunger.

The holiday is a time for sending greeting cards to friends and loved ones, paying visits, giving gifts and enjoying a lot of sweets. Everyone enjoys drinking lots of Turkish tea and coffee in broad daylight after the 30 days of daylight fasting during Ramazan. I especialy love the tradition of children knocking on the door to Show off their new clothes in hope of being given sweets or a coin or two. It always amazes me that when being presented with a large dish of sweets the children are ever so polite and only take one and have to be encourage to take more. Thats not to say that they won’t knock on your door every day of the holiday though!

So today i spent the day visiting my husbands family some of who still are not used to having a foreigner in their home. They ply me with çay (turkish tea) which is a black tea and is generally not drank in cups or mugs but in special glasses (there must be an art to drinking it without burning your fingers but i have yet to find it), and every sweet thing imaginable!
The children bring their friends to practise their english on me and i get a chance to try out my turkish, the neighbours come by to check out the yabancı (foreigner) and they all make me feel extremely welcome. It’s rather like our Christmas.

I had a lovely day with family and even the weather behaved and wasn’t too hot! A nice breeze today. Not a lot of knitting done i’m afraid, but i did manage to start and as you can see in the photo i knit a few rows of a Wrap that i will share with you over the next couple of days.