Selwyn Times: August 19, 2020

32 Wednesday August 19 2020
Latest Canterbury news at starnews.co.nz
HOME PROFESSIONALS
SELWYN TIMES
Spring cleaning
ingrained in our
cultures
Spring cleaning has cultural and
religious roots and also ties back to
keeping winter houses warm with fires
and kerosene which filled houses with
soot and grime.
According to the SpareFoot blog spring
cleaning is a hallmark of Jewish, Iranian
and Chinese cultures.
In ancient Jewish tradition, they would
clean their home to prepare for Passover,
in part to remove any bread that wasn’t
unleavened. That’s because the Jewish
slaves in Egypt survived by eating only
unleavened bread, so having any yeastmade
bread in the house during Passover
isn’t allowed. By thoroughly cleaning
the entire house, including all crumbs,
they could be ensured no non-Kosher
remnants remained.
Spring cleaning is also ritual part of
some Christian faiths as well. Members of
the Greek Orthodox Church for example
typically clean on the first day of lent,
which they call Clean Monday. Catholic
churches conduct a through cleaning of
their altars on the day before Good Friday.
In the Iranian culture, the Persian new
year, known as Nowruz, falls on the first
day of spring and includes a ritual known
as “khooneh takouni” which means
“shaking the house,” entailing a thorough
house clean.
Chinese New Year preparations
incorporate a spring housecleaning called
Little New Year or Xiaonian, designed
to symbolically rid their home of any
negativity and any lingering spirits.
In the United States, spring cleaning
was important in frontier homes to
remove the accumulation of soot from
winter fires that built up on poor quality
window glass and needed to be cleaned so
you could see out the windows.
In addition most log homes in Texas
and parts of the southern United States
were “chinked” for the winter, which
entailed filling the spaces between logs
with mud. As summer approached, the
chinking was removed to allow air to
circulate, a modern-day “screen” of sorts.
Housekeepers would finish the
process by disinfecting and refreshing
their homes with vinegar and herbs,
which are great choices still today as
natural alternatives to harsh household
disinfectants. Another reason to wait
until spring is because it was finally warm
enough to open windows and doors to let
the place air out.
Even these days we still feel that pull
to throw open our windows and remove
all the long-settled dust and dirt from
our home environments. Happy spring
cleaning for 2020.
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