Young people once considered it only natural that they would inherit everything they would need for a fulfilling life from previous generations, and they changed these requirements as they wished. All that is preserved for us as tradition simultaneously represents the legacies of the distant past, of the recent past as the fleeting present, and of the future as the present to come, a traced organic time curve that represents timelessness in a new stylistic unity of new and old.
In our New Years' Greeting programme, we present fragments of New Year's traditions from the period between Christmas and Carnival. We won't present folk customs in their entirety, but would merely like to draw our viewers into their atmosphere. But not only into the atmosphere of those folk traditions, since we are, after all, celebrating the memorial year of Arany and Kodály. Beyond the fruits of the period of folklore collection, we also select notes and melodies from several hundred years previously. We invite our audience to our program by recalling the verse of the oldest surviving Hungarian New Year's Greeting:
The God of heaven and earth, who creates the skies and builds the stars,
That was born to this world by a beautiful virgin for our salvation,
Blesses the beginning of a new year of mercies!
Peace, happiness, wine, wheat and wealth to your homes!
May God keep your livestock from enemies, from the rabble, from the villainous.
Like water from a broad, deep vortex, bubbling ornately,
May the multitude of God's blessings be so abundant!
On your herds of cattle, and on the servants of your houses, I wish it from my heart, Amen!

Presented by: Hungarian Heritage House, MTVA