This time last year we were killing a pig. Saturday morning I woke up to the squeal-the death squeal. You can't imagine how unsettling that noise it. It's a familiar sound these days, though. I read the other day that it's one thing the EU law enforcers may be willing to overlook when it comes to Romania complying to their codes of both sanitation and animal rights. It was reported that 1.5 million pigs will be slaughtered in backyards this Christmas in Romania. That's a lot of people to make angry if that traditions is taken away.
Traditionally, Romanians kill a pig a few days or weeks before Christmas and feast for the holidays. They don't just eat ham, tenderloin, roast...Their delicacies include toba (the parts that would likely be thrown away by most of us but are instead boiled and stuffed inside the stomach and smoked); piftea (similar parts, i.e. ears, feet, snout...boiled into a gelatin; a meat jello, if you can picture it); pateu (liver, heart, tongue... ground and then baked like a meatloaf). And then they do the more subdued dishes like sausage stuffed in the intestines; tenderloin wrapped in sausage and then wrapped again with the parataneam (you remember from biology class, the lacy net that holds the organs together).
So, from the sound of that pig, our neighbors have been busy, cutting, burning, boiling, stuffing and anxiously awaiting the feast to come. How do I know? We did it last year.
"Entering in" is what we're called to do. We did with this extremely traditional and cultural event last year. It put us on the inside as we visited people throughout the season, exchanging pig cutting (that's what they call it) stories. I think they were surprised and grateful that we shared their lives in that way.
So this year, we've chosen to spare our stomachs and the pig, trusting that our efforts from last year will suffice.
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