Mongolian Mission Week 16 - Tsagaan Sar, the Mongolian Lunar New Year

Mongolia Mission Week 16

Our hope with this blog is to share highlights with our family and friends about our exciting opportunities and awesome responsibilities in Mongolia. It's an impossible task, though, because it's hard to condense everything into a few words and pictures. So ask us individually if you'd like to know more about anything! You can contact us by email (jrose219@gmail.com or krose213@gmail.com), Facebook messenger, or you can text Kathy's phone (515-537-3273). 

Tsagaan Sar, the biggest holiday of the year in Mongolia, seems to be a combination of Thanksgiving (lots of food), Memorial Day (celebration of families and memories), Halloween (kids going door to door for treats and money), Easter (many people get new clothes to wear),  and Christmas (many gifts are given). It officially lasts for 3 days (March 1-3 this year), but the government extended it, so most businesses and schools were closed for 5 days. Tsagaan Sar is the celebration of the lunar new year but is actually the Festival of the White Moon. The dates don't correspond to Chinese New Year. It is an amazing holiday full of traditions that have been passed down for centuries!

A type of traditional Mongolian clothing is a deel, which is long and robe-like. Men, women, and children wear deels for big holidays, and we've been told we ought to wear them, too. In Sainshand, we see them worn throughout the year, mostly by the older folks we see on the streets. 

We didn't know where to find them in our little town (we didn't know there was going to be a big bazaar before the holiday), but we had found a person visiting our church who happens to be a tailor as well as a school teacher. He told us he could make us deels in time for the  holiday and measured us on the spot at the church. Then a wonderful member of our church (the only one who speaks English - because he went on a mission to Omaha!) took us to a silk shop and helped us navigate our way through selecting fabrics.

Chukka was on the phone with the tailor to see exactly
how much of each type of fabric we needed.

The shop lady was very helpful with 
suggesting what to choose for trims.

We were pleased to see how our deels turned out; our tailor finished them at 9:00 the night before the holiday! And we were glad to have them. People seemed to honestly appreciate our efforts to celebrate their holiday with them.

The next thing we had to do was to build our little bread shrine for our home. We bought the base for our ul boov, or shoe sole cake, from a woodcraft booth at the bazaar. After we bought the base, we were headed home and stopped at a market. One of the sellers saw it in our bag and lit right up. She told us (and sold us) what we needed: deep fried breads shaped like shoe soles, deep fried bread balls that would partially fill the structure, aaruul curds, and sugar cubes. The layers must be an odd number of layers between 3 and 9 (alternating layers of happiness and pain for the new year, ending with happiness). Nine layers is for government officials, three is for young people, five for middle-aged, and seven for older. John was convinced that at his age, ours should be seven layers. Maybe because we are new here, most advice was for us to have three layers, and that became the plan.

People leave their ul boovs out for the entire
holiday, and since the bread is kind of hard 
to begin with, it's still edible afterwards. Tastes
kind of like a Utah scone.

The elders and sisters enjoy wearing deels, too, even when we clean the church.

Sister Taylor contemplates the joys of service.

Elder Mac looks ready for something-

Then the invitations started. Javkhlantugs, a student in one of our evening classes, is studying to be a train mechanic. He lives in town with his parents, his sister, her husband, and their little boy. They invited us over to their house to learn how to make buuz in their living room, and we happily accepted this evening of friendship.  

 Javkhlantugs' mom shows Mac how
the partially frozen meat should be chopped.

Javkhlantugs' dad is the expert at forming the buuz.

Of course, we had to go on a quest to find meat for our own buuz-making. We’ve enjoyed the goat or mutton ones we’ve tried, and we wanted to be "authentic," so we went looking for goat meat. However, the only meats we have regularly found in the stores are chicken, sometimes pork, and various interesting tubes of processed meat. John’s sleuthing skills worked in our favor, and we found a couple of butchers. But not much goat. So we courageously bought some camel. We liked how lean it looked. 

The challenge is that Mongolians do not make buuz
out of lean meat. They make juicy little dumplings,
and that isn’t as easy with lean meat.

We invited the young English teachers over and had a grand time making and eating dumplings. 

Our buuz do not look as consistent as the ones made
by people who have been doing this since
 they were kids, but they tasted pretty decent.

As we talked, we discovered that Mac went to school with our grandson, Parker. What a small world!

We have some pictures of our kids and grandkids
hanging in our house. That helped us make the connection.

Our friend Molly, who a couple of weeks ago had invited us to her house to make buuz with her family to freeze for the holiday, has a daughter and a son who attend our English classes. They invited us to their house again on the night before Tsagan Tsar for what the daughter described as a Thanksgiving Eve. She said you’re supposed to eat so much you are extremely full, then your new year will be full of good things.  We had fun eating salads and buuz and playing another version of the ankle bones game. This game is so ancient we’ve found the ankle bones in museums from the earliest eras in the country.

We also went to the house of one of our young women that afternoon who, with her friend, made and served us the traditional salads on the afternoon before the holiday as well. We were impressed that they would take on that role and honor us with an invitation.

On the first day of the holiday, which was Saturday this year, many people make a trek up a mountain to see the sunrise as it beckons in a new year. They have cleaned their homes to be spotless. Then they begin visiting close family, with families visiting the eldest relatives first, greeting everyone with a specific and affectionate greeting. People meet new members of the family, like new babies or in-laws. They listen to family stories. Young girls often serve their elders by helping with the dishes, etc., all day as people visit. Relatives give each other gifts.

But also on the first day, children begin what we describe as trick-or-treating, going from door to door with bags to accept candy and money. Luckily our students had prepared us for this custom, but what we were not prepared for was how many came, and for how many hours of the day for a couple of days. It was great fun, though, and many were dressed up in amazing traditional clothes. Some were very shocked to see a foreign couple open the door. Others adapted really fast and told us “thank you” in English, assuming that’s what we spoke.

Two meals between 4:00 and 7:00 on the eve of the holiday had set the stage for what would happen for the next several days. Everyone likes to feed their friends and family for this holiday. A lot of food. 

Each meal follows a traditional pattern. When you enter a home, various foods are laid out on the table. A hot bowl of milk is placed in your hands. It usually contains a little salt and some oil. There are mayonnaise-heavy salads like egg salad, beet salad, and capital salad, which is the most common one and is like an American potato salad made with small squares of potato and ham. There are other salads and fruits, some sweets, and usually a platter or two of sliced processed meat alternated with cucumbers or pickles. Traditionally there is also an entire back of a mutton sitting on a platter (remember the whole sheep we saw at the bazaar last week?).

After you visit for 15 or 20 minutes or so, which is the amount of time it takes to steam pre-frozen buuz (and pretty much fill your stomach with the other food!), the buzz are brought out. Some young English teachers get themselves into gastronomical trouble with how much food they eat as they go from house to house. Some of our students tell us they eat 100 buuz or so over the holiday. Various drinks complete the meal. Because we don't drink alcohol, we didn't drink the vodka or the fermented mare's milk, Airag, which is the traditional drink that has been passed down for centuries. Our hosts were gracious and understanding.

We celebrated with our friends Alice and Michelle.

We celebrated with Aamga and Zaya and their family
- you can see the mutton back below the ul boov.

We celebrated with another English teacher.

We celebrated with Chukka, his wife Baagi,
and their son Olzii.

It was so fun to see festive people everywhere in town and to join in the festivities. 

We were told that during the main three days of the holiday, people are not supposed to argue, or that will mean that they will argue throughout the rest of the year. There was certainly a happy atmosphere in town and a different feel to the air. Some taxi drivers even refused our payment. 

With our friends, we will continue celebrating our commitments to be better people, to honor our heritage, and to share what we have. We can give the gifts of peace and joy to others and receive peace and joy from people who help and support us. We know that we have great cause to celebrate and feel joy in our lives because we have a Savior who has promised us peace when we follow Him and try to live as He lived. He has promised us peace through His holy Spirit to accompany us through the challenges in this life. We have felt these promises fulfilled. They are real because He is real.