Little known facts about that crazy Easter Monday holiday we celebrate in South Bend….

Easter Monday is a holiday in Poland. Wet Easter Monday (Dyngus Day) was traditionally the day boys tried to drench girls with squirt guns, buckets of water, and much more. The girls got their chances for revenge the following day. Now the Monday is usually celebrated by everyone drenching or sprinkling each other. Dyngus Day is a commemoration of the birth of Christianity in Poland (966 A.D.) in which Holy Baptism was administered to Prince Mieszko on Easter Monday, uniting all of Poland under the banner of Christianity. The Dyngus custom is also reminiscent of the mass Baptisms that took place in the Lithuania after the marriage of Polish Queen Jadwiga and Lithuanian Duke Jagiello.

Smigus Dyngus (shming-oos-ding-oos) This term now refers to the Easter Monday drenching custom, although once signified a kind of house-to-house Easter trick or treating that has survived only in a few rural areas. The merrymakers often pulled along a special cart with a live or wooden rooster and received treats and drinks from the households they visited. American Polonian descendants of the 1890s-1930s immigration often celebrate Dyngus Day with a polka dance.

In South Bend, we celebrate Dyngus Day by eating fatty polish food and having copious amounts of political speeches in the “democratic clubs” on the west side of the city. If you’re running for a state or national office from Indiana, and you’re a democrat, you had better come and speak at one of the Dyngus Day celebrations or else you lose a lot of credibility with the people in this town. The most famous Dyngus Day speaker in the history of the celebration in South Bend was Bobby Kennedy in 1968. He gave a “historic” speech here in South Bend just a short while before he was assasinated.

Well, fast forward to 2008. We’re coming upon an Indiana democratic primary in May that actually might matter and the big time presidential candidates are actually taking notice of our little tradition. Hitlery is sending her husband and daugther and Obama is sending local favorite (and pro-life democrat!) Tim Roemer here on his behalf. It’s the most excitement this town has had in a while.

I kinda wish I could go — eat the hard boiled eggs and polish sausage and have a beer at 10:30 am and see how badly Bill Clinton gets booed.