Yordanov Den (St Jordans day), I Love It

I love this, my name day is a day devoted to the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan river & is one of the greatest of the calendar of saints! See this blog post http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5304473842828883848&postID=954272307849518269
It is a day of enlightenment and light and is celebrated by vodosvet -water is sanctified and after the ritual the priest throws the cross in the river or the sea. The men at the bridge dive after the cross to draw it out from the cold water. It is believed that if the cross freezes in the water the year will be fertile and the people will be healthy. Taken from http://www.paylessbg.com/en/articles/Yordanov-Day/31/index.html
I love my name & its meaning & even more now we live here it has more added to it & as Im a Christian I am very chuffed!
Well I had a lovely evening on my name day with my Bulgarian family, it was a very happy evening & I will  definitely be celebrating this every year. Yovo, Pavlinka & anton were all really happy & were joyful & laughing all evening, such a light hearted night. They bought me a present too, a camping gas kettle which we will make good use of in September when we camp over night at Trinity rocks farm for the music fest. I am really looking forward to that!
First up was salad, olives & Rakia, Pavlinka baked one of her amazing Bahnitza's & we devoured the lot
I made traditional Bulgarian meatball soup, one of our very favourite Bulgarian dishes, which they loved. I put a little chilli in & they mentioned it was a bit hot, although for the first time in the last 5 yrs they never stopped to talk or let it get cold! That soup was devoured in a non stop soup fest :-) A compliment indeed!  I served this with my own mixed pepper bread, again they loved it & Yovo kept asking about me making it myself. I love to see them enjoy my cooking as they are very traditional people. When I make something like the bread I  never forget to tell them its made from the produce we grew, this makes it OK & becomes Joanna's traditional Bulgarian whatever, so the fact the bread was homemade, with peppers from the garden, this made it very acceptable, brilliant! Although the soup was very filling I obviously served cake for dessert, they love their cake as do we. I was delighted to find I had plenty in the freezer so there was a selection with Plum muffins, apple & cinnamon cake, grape cake & PumpkinMuffins with a liberal helping of cream.......
I would post photos but my laptop, with said photos, is currently broken, Iwill post asap.....