Tomorrow is St Trifon the Pruner's Day!

Are you ready for the special day tomorrow? Have you made careful preparations to make it an evening to remember, or are you woefully ill-equipped for the big day? Surely you haven't forgotten about it altogether?! That's right, it's the annual celebration of Bulgaria's patron saint of wine, St Trifon Zarezan.

Photo: Flikr/Andrew Morrell Photography

The 14th of February is the feast day of St Trifon the Pruner, celebrated by rural types in Bulgaria since time immemorial. This folksy, semi-pagan ritual couldn't be more different from the hyper-commercial celebration of the slicker, more modern and cosmopolitan St Valentine, only introduced to the more urbane areas of Bulgaria after the fall of communism.


The legend of St Trifon the vine cultivator has it that he mocked the Virgin Mary  as she passed by for not knowing the identity of her baby's father, much as viewers of Jeremy Kyle might do today. Mary was offended by the uncouth pruner, and cast a curse upon him that he would cut his nose with his shears. Hence the epithet Zarezan, meaning 'snub nosed'.




In fact, the annual ritual, which involves the baking of special bread, the first pruning of the vines and mandatory drunkenness for all the men overseen by a 'Vine King' selected from amongst the peasants on the basis of grape-growing prowess, quite clearly has its roots deep in the heathen past of Dionyisian feasting and theatrics, a celebration of fertility of both the vegetable and animal kind.

Bacchus by Caravaggio

Many people nowadays seem fed up with our shallow Valentine's Day tradition, so maybe it is the time to revive Bacchanalia as a more vibrant, earthy and, in hard times, cheaper way to celebrate love, food and wine? It chimes well with the contemporary revolt in some circles against the worlds of finance, global business and vacuous consumerism, and although it is, in a way, religious, perhaps a more suitable word would be spiritual.

But in these enlightened times, if neither Valentine nor Trifon float your boat, fully customisable online card-vendors mean you can now send a professional-looking greetings card for your own made-up festival. Avoid offending those mythical people who are offended by Christmas cards, and - even better - do offend oversensitive, reactionary religious people by sending them your own customised Winterval cards bearing the legend 'Merry Bearded-Fat-Man Day'. Members of the census-Jedi cult can send each other cards commemorating Ewok Eve, whenever it happens to fall this year.

Photo: Flikr/mtcarlson

So stop moaning about Valentine's Day, as if it were somehow obligatory. It seems to me that special 'Days' of every kind are under attack. They may have been colonised, subverted and mangled by the marketing industry, but that doesn't mean that you have to do away with special celebrations altogether. It simply requires a bit more effort and imagination to find, reinvent and create new feast days that suit your own idea of what an arbitrary ritual should be, and then have enough tolerance, charm and ability to compromise to get other people to celebrate it with you. Here's to St Trifon!