Tradition
The goal of the preparation ritual is to distance the bad spirits that, according with the tradition, lie in wait for men and women to try to curse them. All occasions are good for a queimada: a party, familiar meetings or gatherings of friends. After dinner, in the darkness of night, is one of the best times for it. The tradition also says that one of the perfect days to make the "conxuro da queimada" (spell of queimada) is in Samhain, the Celtic New Year's Eve. However, typically the Queimada ritual takes place during St. John's night or 'witches' night' on the 23rd of June.
The people who take part in it gather around the container where it is prepared, ideally without lights, to cheer up the hearts and to be better friends. One of them ends the process of making the queimada while reciting the spell holding up the burning liquid in a ladle and pouring it slowly back into the container.
Read more about this topic: Queimada (drink)
Famous quotes containing the word tradition:
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.”
—Allan Bloom (1930–1992)
“The words of the Constitution ... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.”
—Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965)