September marks the end of Ethiopia’s three-month long torrential monsoon rains. With that it inaugurates its new year (September 11) and spring time. It is a season filled with excitement and the high sprit of renewal and expectations of a new harvest and yet another round of celebrations, festivals, anticipated life moves and happenings. Nature pours out her wonderful bounties in prolific variety and abundance. The land is everywhere decked with a kaleidoscope of blossoms filling the air with their enchanting fragrances of which the yellow daisy or Meskel Flower is the most visible and omnipresent. There is also a Meskel bird – the usually unremarkable gray fire-finch that grows special red and yellow plumage for the season. All this comes together in the feast of Meskel wherein culture and nature, history and the new year combine in a celebration that is unique to Ethiopia although its theme is common to all Christendom. The Meskel Festival commemorates the finding by Queen Helen, mother of the first Roman Christian Emperor Constantine – of the wooden cross on which Jesus was crucified. When Queen Helen started to look for the cross she had sticks gathered, lighting it with fire and pouring much incense on the fire. When the smoke rose to the sky and settled on the spot where the Cross was buried, she ordered workmen to dig and recovered the Cross. That is what the Demera, – the public bonfire of the Ethiopian Meskel festival shown on this bag design – recalls. Meskel (cross) is the second, after new year, big national holiday of the Ethiopian New Year. It is also one of the two- the other being Epiphany or Timket – very popular religious holidays celebrated by the Ethiopian Orthodox church in spiritual ceremony outside church precincts. The celebration at the amphitheater of Meskel Square in the heart of Addis Ababa is mystically colorful and full of pageantry with hundreds of exotically dressed priests from all the churches in the city taking part, chanting and gently shaking in their sacred dances. The Meskel Festival is celebrated every year on 27th of September. The festivities officially begin around 4p.m. and the big bonfire is lit up against the setting sun just before 6:00 p.m. At about 7:00 in the evening the people put up their own demera in their respective front yards, light their individual neatly tied up sticks (chibo) and set fire to the demera and chant “ENGUROGEBASH”. ENGUROGEBASH means: go out thou cabbage pot, come in the porridge pot.