Peculiar Easter tradition of witches

In March, Goth Gardener announced a Baskets & Caskets competition. To participate, one needs to make a post according to the theme Goth Easter. Now, I don't believe this post fits the given topic but nevertheless Goth Gardener inspired me to write this post. :)

This post is once again about the odd traits of the Finns. Previously I've featured Nuuttipukki (the creepy Santa Claus) and fortunetelling traditions.

On Easter, we have a tradition that is very similar to the trick-or-treating on Halloween. It's called 'virpominen'. In short, children dress as witches or Easter bunnies and go around the neighborhood in order to get candy. BUT: they are not like evil spirits on Halloween who threat people with tricks.

Instead it is more like a mutually beneficial transaction. The kids collect and decorate sticks of pussy willow and will use them to cast spells of good luck for the neighbors. After the spell the kids will give the decorated willow to the neighbor and as a payment the kids will receive some candy.

Since I was super fascinated by witches as a kid (and still am), I was as excited about Easter as I was about Christmas. I could dress as a witch myself, it was like heaven! To clarify my behavior, I want to point out that during my childhood Halloween was not a big thing (it is still a very minor holiday here in Finland).

Here is a photo from my childhood. Since Finland is so up North, we used to have winter weather on Easter (at least during the 90's, with the climate change it is sort of a spring nowadays). So, us kids used to have to dress our witch garments over our winter coats. Nevertheless, it was always super fun!

In the photo you'll see the most fashionable gear an Easter witch could have: a black paper board hat and a broom. The broom was made by my father and I had tied some scarfs around my waist to get the proper witch look. The witch's familiar is also appearing in the photo (aka my pet dog).

The traditions behind virpominen

This tradition has roots both in the Orthodox traditions and in the old customs Finns had before Christianity arrived. I am not an expert on these traditions and beliefs, but here is how I've understood the historical roots of this tradition.

Pussy willows are not just a Finnish thing, in Eastern European countries many people use pussy willow in their rites on Palm Sunday. Palms do not grow here in the North, so people needed to substitute them with some other plant. I'm not sure if this is something people still do, but in the old days a priest blessed the willow sticks and then children took them home, decorated them, and then used the willows to bless their immediate family.

Willows made by the kids next door.

There is also another Christian belief related to virpominen. In the Nordic countries, people believed that during the days between the Good Friday and Easter Sunday the protecting powers of God were, well, diminished. Therefore people believed that evil witches were roaming around the countryside and causing misfortune to people. To prevent this, people did all sorts of protection spells that resemble the idea behind virpominen.

So, that was the Christian part of the tradition of virpominen. I am guessing that the pagan roots of the Finns twisted it a bit and that is why the kids dress as witches for it. In the old times, witches, witch doctors and shamans were appreciated members of the community. I guess that's why there are also good witches who now cast spells of good luck.

I've not heard that other countries would have this tradition of virpominen. If you have, please comment on this post!

I hope you enjoyed this little piece of information and do check out what people contributed to Goth Gardener's competition!

Personal update and a review of Demeter's perfumes

The "How are you?" -part 

This Autumn was awfully busy for me. I had 4 posts planned but did not have time or energy to actually write them. Is it just me, or do people in general have very hectic lives in October and in November? I feel like every year my Autumn is so busy I do not really have time to enjoy it.

Partly the reason for the recent silence in this blog is that about every Autumn I get an awful flu and one or more sinus infections. It's hard to try to write witty posts if your head is full of snot. :)

The Autumn leaves just before the first snow.

I had a birthday a week ago but did not have time to plan a party to celebrate it. I have this feeling that for the past 7 years I've been so busy in November that I haven't really had time to celebrate my birthday properly. Year 2014 being an exception, because that year I managed to have the werewolf themed party.

Even though I have not written this blog for a while, I did manage to participate into a couple of projects that involved writing. I wrote a scientific article about a French short story L'insecte by Claire Castillon. It was published in a web magazine Metalepsis by the Literature students from University of Tampere. The magazine is in Finnish. I also started to write more fiction myself and I noticed I enjoy it very much.

Demeter Fragrance Review

A couple of months ago I ordered some perfumes and colognes from the Demeter Fragrance Library. I was intrigued by their product called The Funeral Home and the scent series inspired by Elvira. Of the Elviras I decided to order Zombie. They also had Vampire but the description suggested it would be much sweeter than the Zombie, and I do not like to wear very sweet scents myself.

A photo of me without any real reason. 

Demeter has a vast scent library and the idea is that the user will make their own cocktail of two or more scents. The scents are layered on the skin and thus one can create a unique personal cologne/perfume. Unlike most of the products, the Elvira perfumes are ready-made and they include several ingredients.

I did not order just two products. I also got several ingredients from the scent library. They were: mahogany, licorice, snow, thunderstorm, sunshine and riding crop. I also got another ready-made cologne that was inspired by New Zealand.

Testing perfumes and l'eau de toilettes is tricky because
a) a scent will smell a bit different on different people and
b) one gets used to the smell of perfume on their skin and will not necessarily notice it after a couple of hours. Hence it is not easy to actually know, what the final scent will be.

For me another problem was that I've had a common cold for almost two months now, and that effects the way I can smell things.

My first impressions of the Elvira's Zombie

It smells nice but not as earthy as I thought it would be. I imagined a zombie fragrance to be a bit more edgy. It is sweeter than I imagined but not too sweet for me. It has lovely, slightly spicy undertones and I use it on casual events and at work.

My first impression of the Funeral Home

It smells exactly like the name suggests: white flowers like lilies and a hint of mahogany and oriental carpet. In that sense, it is a great product. Unfortunately it is a tad too floral for me on its own so I have to try to mix some heavier undertones to it. It already has some mahogany in it, so I just add some more when I use it.

Final conclusions

In general, the scents are lovely and/or intriguing and none of them were a disappointment to me. I feel that the scents do not change radically nor disappear after an hour, which is great.

What I really like is that when one sprays the perfume, it gives just a small doze. This way it is easier to use the correct amount. It's awful when people have huge clouds of smell surrounding them. You are not supposed to smell another persons perfume from the distance of 2 meters!

All in all, I can happily recommend the products of Demeter Fragrance Library. 

Identity crisis of a former literature student

Warning: This is going to be more of a personal post.

I graduated last June (I'm a Master of Arts, baby!) and have been super lucky to find a job matching  my education, at least for the end of the year.

This whole thing is rather odd because for the past six years, a big and important part of my identity has been 'a literature student' and now I no longer am a literature student. I still read a lot of literature and scientific research on literature but I no longer live in the city of my former University and no longer participate to any courses.

Me on a very physical wooden elephant, symbolically looking to the future.

In a way I am excited and happy of my new life and all the things that have filled it but in a way I really miss the academic life. The courses and the intense discussions among staff and students, the sensation when I understood something vital or groundbreaking, the butterflies in the stomach when I handed in my Thesis. But I also miss the small and often quite physical things, like the stairs at the University's Main Library. The smell in the corridors of our Department. The voice of my French teacher.

I guess writing this is a sort of a rite of moving on.

Goth Gardener recently wrote a post about how she is going back to graduate school in order to get another degree. When I read it my heart filled with excitement for my friend but also with longing for the academic atmosphere. Goth Gardener's description of the campus area is great, by the way! My University was not that goth-y or romantic. Goth Gardener's post made me think, how much I really miss being a student. I pondered about it and came to the conclusion that I do not yearn to be a student again but I yearn to learn new things and to have intellectual discussions about literature. I'm pretty confident those things can be arranged even in my current life situation.

Me and my Uni friends in a mirror hall.

Even though student life is now part of the past, the friends from those times will stay. Just last weekend me and some of my closest friends from the Uni went to the amusement park Linnanmäki (name means roughly 'a hill with a castle on top of it'). No-one knows where all of us end up in the future but it does feel like we shall remain good friends for the rest of our lives.

Personal update and some uncanny art

Once again a month has passed by. I have been working on my thesis relentlessly and I am happy to say that in two weeks it shall be finished and I will graduate this semester! That will mean that I have more time to write this blog. ^__^ Another thing that has been preoccupying my free time for the past couple of months is the search for an apartment. In the beginning of June I start working in a different city and need to find a place to live. I am really excited because a new chapter is beginning in my life.

For the past couple of months I have visited several art exhibitions but they have not often suited the themes of this blog a.k.a. the artworks I've seen have not been extremely "goth" nor have they represented darker aesthetics. This installation is something I would like to feature. I think it is rather uncanny.

This installation was made by Finnish artist Mia Hamari. Another work of hers was featured in this post in January. The name of this work is "Manual, Siberia, Jester, Party". It is made of two figures. A more human-like creature and an animal with a human face. Hamari draws inspiration from dreams and the subconscious. Her works often feature a human-animal metamorphosis. In this work there are also mechanical/clockwork aspects to them, since the other one has wheels instead of back limbs.

This work was exhibited at the Gallen-Kallela Museum. Gallen-Kallela is one of our national artists and the museum is his old home turned into an exhibition place. There are changing exhibitions and this work of Mia Hamari can be seen till the end of May 2016.

As you can see, this artwork is made of mixed materials, among them bronze, wood and parts of animals. The animals Hamari uses in her art have died in accidents. She has also used human parts like hair and eyelashes. Presumably they are of her own or donated to her.

This smaller statue is the size of a small terrier or another dog. What I really like about this installation is that the expressions on both the creatures' faces are a bit ambiguous, one can easily interpret several different feelings. This way the work can express different feelings and atmospheres, depending of the viewer. The small one is looking up and the taller one has closed its eyes. Though the small one has no pupils in its eyes so nobody knows if it can even see. Very uncanny.

I hope you liked this installation of Mia Hamari!

Picturesque city of Tampere

Lady Nancy from Retro Electric mentioned in a comment, that I should show more photos of the aesthetic sides of my hometown. I live in Tampere, Finland, the population is about 300 000 and it is the largest inland city in the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland). Tampere is an old manufacturing town and sometimes people call it the Manchester of Finland.

These two photos are from the older area of the city center of Tampere.

The houses next door to my flat. Unfortunately the building I live in is not this photogenic.

The eastern orthodox church. I walk past it every time I go to the university. Slightly off-topic: I have made progress with my master's thesis and things are looking good!

I would probably kill for getting to live in that green house, preferably in the tower.

This red and white building is a theater. In the upper window you can just see the huge chandelier they have.

A couple of days ago we had our first snow. Alas, it did not stay long but it made everything much prettier. The city of Tampere is divided by a river. It is beautiful with a park area on both sides.

The final photo is from the old factory, which nowadays has a shopping center, bars and bistros, museums and other facilities for culture, and a cinema.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you liked the photos!

A tiny bit late Halloween post

It seems like many bloggers had a lovely Halloween and I too had a relatively good one. I've been buried under my studies (no change there) but I did manage to go to my student association's Halloween party. Since the common stereotype is that every day is Halloween for goths, it is not a big deal that I am a bit late with my post.

Me and my friend decided to dress with a mutual theme and we chose this old computer game Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Nobody recognized us, of course, but we had a really good time.  We dressed as the two personalities of a one vampire: Therese / Jeanette Voerman.

We bought some fangs from the local costume shop and the fangs were no good at all. They were cheap but unusable. The shop did not have more expensive ones, so we had to take what was available because we were horribly late with the whole costume idea. We decided it about 48 hours before the actual party. In the end we did not even use the fangs but that did not matter. :)

I used that metal nail file in the photo to make those fangs a bit smaller but they were still really impractically big. The glue thingy did not work or I did not have the patience to wait it to work. The instruction was a bit vague about how long one was supposed to wait with it.

Here is an original photo of the character Therese Voerman, as you can see, she has decided to wear glasses, though I'm pretty sure her eyesight as a vampire is exquisite. Easy to dress as, so I am not complaining!

Source

The much more useful product was moonlight white make-up, which worked really well, expect it dried up my face even though I had put a lot of moisturizer underneath. It looked good and that's what matters, right? :) Unfortunately the lighting was not good and hence it does not show well in the photos. Life's small annoyances, eh?

This beautiful scenery is from the centre of my home town. The city councilor or some other entity has decided to install lights above the river. The Autumn here is so beautiful.

Have a lovely November!

Surprise Halloween present from fellow blogger!

I was supposed to write my next post about old fairy tales but life intervened in a form of a box decorated with bats.

Unexpectedly I received a Halloween gift package from the amazing Goth Gardener! She had decided to bring the joy of Halloween to those friends who live far and she sent us magnificent treats. This all happened with help from her husband who I had the chance to meet while I was in DC and I can honestly say that Goth Gardener and her spouse are extremely nice and warm people! Absolutely golden, I might say. :D

The first thing inside the box was a card from Goth Gardener, and I must say I truly admire her style! This card is the cutest Halloween card I've ever gotten.

I was super excited about this wonderful gift because we do not have Halloween stuff like this on my home country. Small selection might come into stores in the middle of October and vanish as soon as we reach November.

This package included two different styles of candles, an accessory scarf, hauntingly delicious hot chocolate and two other things I was astonished to find:

The most amazing part is that this package included a huge and aromatic pumpkin spice soap and hand towel set with gorgeous spiderweb decoration. I was just about to buy me a new soap bar and I only have two hand towels at the moment, so this gift couldn't have been more suitable. I'm pretty sure Goth Gardener has some serious psychic talents. :)

Thank you, Goth Gardener, you really made my day (Hell, you made my whole Autumn!) with this lovely gesture of friendship. <3

Goth tourist in Dublin

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent the first weekend of September in Dublin.

Things I saw

I went to two art museums, the National Gallery of Ireland and The Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery. Both were exquisite and had free entry. Nothing extremely goth art was on display, so I am not going to write about them much. All I'll say is that if you are in Dublin, they are extremely nice places to spend a couple of hours.

Another not particularly goth or gloomy place to visit but in which I had a great time was Teeling Whiskey Distillery. They arrange tours and it is the only working whiskey distillery in Dublin.

In these huge tanks water leaves alcohol. They all had names and the liquid goes through from the biggest to the smallest. There are three copper ladies in a row.

Rebecca on the right can hold 9 000 liters. She is the smallest one. If I remember correctly the biggest of the sisters has the capacity of 15 000 liters or more.

A tad more goth-y or at least more geeky place to visit would be the old library of The Trinity College. The quality of photos is awful due to lighting conditions (to preserve old books). One could photograph only in The Long Room. If you think there is something familiar in this place, it might be because you have seen its doppelganger in the movie Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones.

They have around 200 000 books in this library and many of them are extremely valuable first editions. The most priced book of this library is the Book of Kells, It was written and drawn around year 800 and it contains the four Gospels. The most intriguing thing about it are the marvelous drawn decorations. Underneath this Long Room in the photos is a huge exhibition area dedicated solely to the Book of Kells. 

The most goth tourist attraction I found on a 48 hour trip was Marsh's Library. They have many ghost stories and other peculiar and sometimes morbid things on display. Among them a copy of Jonathan Swift's dear friend's skull. No photos are allowed to take in the library, so alas, I have nothing to show. They do have great photos and information on their website, though.

The Marsh's Library has stayed pretty much the same for 300 years and is an almost pristine example of 18th century library. James Joyce, Jonathan Swift and Bram Stoker have all visited it and used its services. The library still has the chair Mr. Stoker rested his bum on while he read about witchcraft!

One thing particular makes this place the gothiest place I visited and it is because their history and that they made a small comic book about the weirdest tales. It was created by John Rooney, the illustrator, and Julie Burke, who is the Education and Outreach Officer of the Marsh's Library.

I bought a copy and I must say it is great! I adore the style of the illustrator. All incidents or stories consist of a one picture and a text box but they are really amusing and sometimes a bit gross. My favorite story is about a 3500 years old mummy that was found in a cupboard at the library in 1888. Nobody knows how it ended up there!

You can read this small treasure online, if you want to, though I must say that buying it for mere 2 euros for a physical copy is a very good deal. They also have beautiful photos of details of their collection on Pinterest.

Prospects on shopping

In the post before the trip I wrote that I would like to go to goth clothing shops, if possible. There were a couple of alternative fashion stores in the Temple Bar area. They were nice but they mostly sold rock, psycho-billy etc. styles so I end up leaving without any purchases.

Obviously for those interested in Celtic myths, jewelry, and things related the Green Island is a heaven. Celtic necklaces are beautiful but not my style anymore, so no products came to my possession. What I really wanted to have was a selection of animal themed sticky notes. The bat and the dodo are my favorites.

 The sticky notes were sold in the shop of the National Gallery of Ireland. It contains 8 different animals in 8 different sticky note piles and it costed about 12 euro.

From an Irish gift shop called Old World New I found this beautiful thing. "Wolf's Bane. Potion No. 5. Slightly bitter potion to take the edge off your Lycanthropy. Drink at your own risk."

I am not sure if one can actually use it and store some liquid in it. The bottleneck is really small and it would be a pain in the ass to try to clean it after usage. No matter, it looks gorgeous by my window, next to a candelabra I found at a flea market last summer.

Next up: Creepy Reads Review after a long pause!

Sneak a peek of my home

And I really mean a teeny tiny sneak-peek of my homely objects. The decor is still horribly unfinished but here are some fragments in photos.

In this jar are laundry soap nuts. They are a natural and ecological washing product to be used instead of washing powder. They have no particular smell or fragrance and they do not tend to cause allergies. I like them a lot since my skin is rather sensitive to fabric softeners and washing powders.

Also, I do not like it if the laundry detergents have strong odors. It will intervene one's perfume. Think about it, shampoo and conditioner smell to fruity things, laundry powder smells some other freshness or fruits, your body butter something else. and then you might have l'eau de toilette or perfume on your skin. It is a cacophony of odors.

In this other photo you will see something I do not like to live without. A coffeemaker. I received as a gift this fancy model that has a small kettle to whip milk. Therefore I could make cappuccinos, lattes etc. I never drink my morning coffee with milk, so I have not yet used the milk part it in my new apartment. I have made pretty drinks with it before, though.

Here is a layered drink I made some time ago. There is cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on top. It was made into a Campari glass, because I either have an alcohol problem or it was the only glass that was the right size and had the right form for successful layering. I leave it to you to judge.

Even though I delight in photographing my everyday necessities, I also wish to share with you a triumph of mine.

About a year ago I bought an art print called Valon tuoma, which means "brought by light". It is made by a Finnish graphic artist from the city of Lahti which is situated about an hour's drive or an hour's train trip away from the capital, Helsinki. Unfortunately I have temporarily mislaid the little informational paper with facts about the artist who produced this work and I can not quite make out the name of the artist from the signature. Shame on me.

Regardless of that I am still going to show it because I am filled with motherly proud of this gorgeous work of art. Motherly because I finally got appropriate frames for it. They are made of some luscious dark red/brown wood and they have lovely old-looking metal decorations around them. I guess if I cleaned them they would be more like silver but I quite fancy that darker shade.

Little patina is so romantic goth, isn't it?

As you probably know, when printing graphics each print will be slightly different from the others and the last of the series can be of completely different shade of a color (if there are like 200 prints). My brought by light is 3/6. That means there were only six of them made and it is the third one of the series.

In the art shop there was also the first one of the series but its colors were slightly more warm, so I decided to have the third one. The colors felt more night-like. Maybe the ominous warmth could have been interpreted as some nuclear fallout and unhealthy radiation but I like cold shades more than warm ones. Wine or ruby red is the only exception. Of course I do not loathe warm colors but I would not wear them unless I had a good amount of black fabric shielding me from them. ;)

I wanted the frames to be somewhat old. I found these from a flea-market. They costed about 13 euros and they were a bargain. Inside the frames was a painting of some sort of a small palm tree in a pot. It was so hideous that if I had tried to photograph it my camera's lens would have shattered.

On the back side was a thick layer of tape around the edges to keep the disgusting palm tree inside. I tore them off only to find out that there were 25 nails keeping the back lid still. Overdoing it, much?

After some powerful curse words I finally got it open.

The artwork was slightly smaller than the frames so I decided to buy a regular black paperboard as a background. It was a tad too long so I cut it. Work in progress to be seen here:

The end result is here. I really like it. The paper on which the picture is printed is slightly curly, so you can see sort of small waves on the paper. Please click the photo for larger view!

I adore this work. The skeleton figure in the middle of snowy forest. Macabre, intimidating and sublime.

By the way, it was really hard to try to take photos from an angle the reflections would not spoil the photo! 7/10 performance, I'd say.

Next up: Some highlights from my trip to Dublin and then Creepy Reads Review about some disturbing fairy tales by Brothers Grimm!