Easter Monday

Easter Monday is the day after Easter Sunday and is celebrated as a holiday in some largely Christian cultures, especially Roman Catholic cultures. Easter Monday in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar is the second day of the octave of Easter Week. In Poland and parts of the United States, Easter Monday is called Dyngus Day.Formerly, the post-Easter festivities involved a week of secular celebration, but this was reduced to one day in the 19th century.
Events include egg rolling competitions and, in predominantly Roman Catholic countries, dousing other people with water which traditionally had been blessed with holy water the day before at Easter Sunday Mass and carried home to bless the house and food.In the Eastern Orthodox Church and those Eastern Catholic Churches which follow the Byzantine Rite, Easter Monday is known as Bright Monday or Renewal Monday, and is the second day of Bright Week. The services are exactly the same as on Pascha (Easter Sunday), except that the hymns from the Octoechos are in Tone Two.
It is customary to have a Crucession (procession headed by a cross) either after Paschal Matins or after the Paschal Divine Liturgy. It is customarily a day for visiting family and friends.One theory is that Dyngus originates from the baptism on Easter Monday of Mieszko I (Duke of the Polans, c. 935 - 992) in 966 AD, uniting all of Poland under the banner of Christianity. Dualism and "twins" are featured in Slavic pre-Christian paganism. Dyngus and Śmigus were twin pagan gods; the former representing water and the 'moist' earth (Dyngus from din gus - thin soup or dingen - nature) and the later, representing thunder and lightning (Smigus from Śmigać or to making a whooshing sound). In this theory, the water tradition is the transformation of the pagan water god into the Christian baptism.
The custom of pouring water was an ancient spring rite of cleansing, purification, and fertility. It is alleged that the pagan Poles bickered with Nature/Dyngus by means of pouring water and switching with willows to make themselves pure and worthy of the coming year. Others have suggested that the striking tradition is the transformation of the ritual "slap" of Christian confirmation. However, still others suggest that the Smigus tradition is actually simply a youthful recapitulation of a Good Friday Polish tradition, in which parents wake their children with switches from twigs, whispering the words of a Lent prayer "the wounds of God" or "God is wounded" -'bozerani . Early in the Colombian evolution of the tradition, the Dyngus custom was clearly differentiated from Śmigus: Dyngus was the exchange of gifts (usually eggs, often decorated like pisankas), under the threat of water splashing if one party did not have any eggs ready, while Śmigus referred to the striking.