Spring Cleaning ???
Spring is here and that means it’s time to do “spring cleaning.” Time to beat out the rugs, vacuum the drapes, and all while trying to keep your allergies in check.
What I want to know is who decided spring was the time to do it? Why would anyone want to waste perfectly lovely days cleaning? I hate cleaning. For me it’s the ultimate procrastination technique: want to put off writing that paper on Latin American politics? Clean your room, apartment, patio, and anything else you can think of (I have even dusted, alphabetized, and then gone back to rearrange all my books by height in an effort to avoid doing something.) But back to spring and the fact that history seems to tell us it’s a great time to clean.
I have read three different answers to why it is we do “spring cleaning.” First, prior to the celebration of Passover ancient Jews used to clean their homes from top to bottom to make sure that there was no leavened bread in the house. In fact, the night before Passover, Jews would search for leavened bread crumbs by candlelight. Passover is normally during spring, therefore, “spring cleaning.”Another answer of where the term and act come from dates back to the Persian New Year, Iranian Norouz, which falls on the first day of spring. Persians and Iranians today clean their homes from top to bottom for New Year (sounds like a good idea for new beginning s an what not to me).The term for this cleaning of your house from top to bottom translates roughly to shaking the house.
The answer that more than likely is why we use the term here in the States is not for religious or cultural reasons but because of necessity (which, I guess, can be viewed as cultural but not in the sense that we do it before a specific holiday or in alignment with a specific date). In areas where it is incredibly moist or cold during the winter months (not moist like Marina moist, but lots and lots of rain and snow) there is no time to dust out your home until the weather is a bit friendlier. Back before the advent of the vacuum cleaner (for all of you that may remember not having one, I’m in awe. I don’t know how you did it) the best time of year to do the dusting, etc. was during the month of March. Why, you may ask? Simple: that’s the time of year when it was warm enough to leave all the doors and windows open and it wasn’t yet warm enough (or muggy enough as the case may be) for insects to be much of a problem.
So, if you ever wonder where the term comes from or
why you’re stuck at work having to do spring cleaning (when ,
technically you could have been cleaning all a long) now you know.
Anyway, back to my
spring cleaning.
