DENYS POWLETT JONES writes at the website Catholic Phoenix about the traditional Polish Easter Monday, known as Dyngus Day after a pagan water deity. He writes:

For a few centuries, the historical record is silent in matters of Dyngus. Then, in the 15th century, the Easter Monday custom resurfaces in Poland—but now it has turned into a courting ritual, one in which young men seek out the village’s most eligible and desirable girls on Easter Monday in order to dump buckets of water on them and then whip them on the legs with pussy willows. I told you this was no laughing matter.

Girls who ended the day bone dry and without any welts on their calves were considered virtually unmarriageable.

Sometimes, apparently, the girls fought back against such antics—at one time, an additional custom was to throw pottery at the boys on Easter Tuesday, but in later times the younger generation, who naturally had no respect for the customs of their elders, couldn’t wait and went ahead and chucked crockery at the boys on Dyngus Day itself, sometimes even before the boys had started the conversation with an old-fashioned soaking. (Especially shameless girls turned everything on its head and took to dumping water on BOYS the day after Easter. O tempora, o mores!)

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