Craciun Fericit.

It's Christmas time in Romania once again which means it's time for the annual Christmas PET festival.

The PET festival started many decades ago after the introduction of plastic, 2 liter bottles into Romania. During communism, if you wanted to purchase milk, juice or a soda, you would bring an empty pig bladder to the store and have them fill it with the beverage of your choice. The pig bladder was the Romanian version of a shopping bag, people would also use it to carry dry goods and meats home from the market. Sometimes,  people would forget their groceries were left hanging in the pig bladders for several months and this led to the invention of many Romanian delicacies such as caş or toba. After the introduction of the PET bottle, clever Romanians realized that they could reuse these bottles for varying purposes, such as storing wine or palinka. However, the greatest use of the PET bottle is to ward off the evil spirits that wander through the forests and mountains of Romania. That's why if you travel through Romania, you will see the entire country covered in PET bottles.

The celebration of the PET festival, though fairly recent, has its origins in the far-distant past of the Romanian Orthodox religion. In 5 AD, near Christmas time, the country of Romania was threatened by an invasion of a Turkish army and a clever Orthodox priest advised the current Romanian king, Radu cel Prost that since the Turks perceived pigs as being unclean, it would be wise to have the Romanian soldiers cut off the heads of pigs and wear them as helmets to frighten off the angry Turks. While the Turks did not eat pork and did indeed consider them to be filthy animals, they had no problem killing pigs, or in this case, Romanians wearing a rotting pig head as a hat.

The ensuing battle was one of the bloodiest in Romanian history, some Turks actually were purported to have drowned in a river of Romanian and pig blood. After the defeat of the Romanian army by the Turks, the Ottoman king ordered that all pigs in Romania be slaughtered and that all Romanians would from that day forward be ordered to wear silly hats as a mark of shame.

For nearly 2,000 years now, Romanians have continued the Christmas tradition of putting on silly hats, going into the villages and slaughtering pigs. The PET festival ends when all of the bottles wine, palinka and tuica have been drained and the pigs are butchered. The empty bottles are then tossed into the neighboring forests and rivers to ward off the spirits of those long-dead Romanian warriors who died at the hands of the Ottomans.

The technique of slaughtering the pig has to be carried out in a very specific way that reflects the long Romanian history of randomly chopping up animals with an ax. First, a large fire is made on which to burn the pig. The pig is not actually "cooked" during this process, just set on fire to scare the hell out of him. It is a Romanian belief that animals that were terrified before being butchered taste better. First, the butchering party (for it is indeed a party) get very drunk, then lure the pig from its stall by promising it a better life in Italy if it comes out. Once the pig has been lured out into the open, the men will pounce on it with clubs, hatchets or axes. One of the party will jump on the pig's back, lift its head and cut its throat. While the pig runs about in the mud, blood gushing from it's wound, the pig will be tackled again and thrown onto the fire. Then, while it is still twitching, the women and children will run out into the yard with forks and knives and carve slivers of it's bloody flesh and gobble it down amidst laughter and giggles. 

After the pig has finally succumbed to it's injuries, it is then randomly chopped into large, bloody, indiscernible chunks, wrapped in a pig bladder and thrown into the freezer.