These seasons and festivals are still celebrated today — for example, Jāņi is a national holiday.

Jāņi ( pronounced ) is a Latvian festival held in the night from 23 June to 24 June to celebrate the summer solstice ( Midsummer ), the shortest night and longest day of the year.

Jānis is also traditionally the most common of Latvian male given names, corresponding to English name John, and everybody of the name Jānis holds a special honor on this day ( Jāņi is a plural form of Jānis ) and wears an oak wreath.

Jāņi is thought to be the time when the forces of nature are at their most powerful, and the boundaries between the physical and spiritual worlds are thinnest.

Jāņi also is thought to be the perfect time to gather herbs, because it is believed that they then have magical powers on this day.

Traditional food during Jāņi is a special type of cheese with caraway seeds, made out of curd, and the traditional drink is beer.

In Latvia, Midsummer is called Jāņi ( Jānis being Latvian for John ) or Līgo svētki ( svētki = festival ).

Caraway cheese is traditionally served on the Latvian festival Jāņi.

A traditional Latvian cheese is Jāņu siers ( caraway cheese ); this is traditionally served during the celebration of Jāņi or midsummer.

A double wedding is celebrated during the Jāņi ( Midsummer festivities ), but the heroes soon set off to fight the German crusaders.

In ancient Latvia, Ziemassvētki ( Winter holiday ) was a festival, celebrated on 25 December, which was one of the two most important holidays, the other being Jāņi.

Jāņi has been a strong aspect of Latvian culture throughout history, originating in pre-Christian Latvia as an ancient fertility cult.

* The festival of Jāņi

Representatives of Latvian Emergency services often warn that Jāņi can be harmful to health because of the amounts of food and alcoholic beverages consumed, as well as maltreated fires.

* Folk beliefs of Jāņi in Latvian

Celebrations consist of a lot of traditional and mostly Pagan elements-eating Jāņi cheese ( special recipe with caraway seeds ), drinking beer, baking pīrāgi, singing hundreds of Latvian folk songs dedicated to Jāņi, burning bonfire to keep light all through the night and jumping over it, wearing wreaths of flowers ( for women ) and oak leaves ( for men ) together with modern commercial products and ideas.

Lithuanian Rasos ( turned into Saint Jonas ' Festival by Christianity ) and Latvian Līgo ( turned into Jāņi ) involve making wreaths, looking for the magical fern flower, burning bonfires, dancing around and leaping over the fire, and greeting the sun when it rises at around 4am next morning.

The day of Līgo () ( 23 June ) and the day of Jāņi ( pronounced ) ( 24 June ) are public holidays, and people usually spend them in the countryside.

Still, traditions of Jāņi contain no reference to Christianity or any Christian symbolism.

Other practices of magic in Jāņi vary from fortune-telling to ensuring productivity of crops, as well as livestock fertility.

Many people make the cheese of Jāņi themselves ; a few also make their own beer.

It's most renowned for its annual children's summer camp and Jāņi ( St John's Day ), a summer solstice celebration.

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This is the ancient morality of the

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