Portuguese Crowning Procession

Yesterday, I was caught off guard by the sound of a marching band. I ran to the window and saw something I’d never seen before: a procession with a marching band (that part I had seen before) with a series of couples and young women in elaborate gowns carrying crowns (that was new to me!).  Naturally, I grabbed my camera and hurried to get photos. I inquired what the occasion was, and got a brief explanation. In essence, it’s a tradition of our Portuguese-speaking community (from Portugal and the Azores, not Brazil), related to Pentecost, celebrated by the parish of Our Lady of Good Voyage.   I found a more detailed explanation here in an old article of the Gloucester daily Times.  [Update: a fellow GMG blogger gave a great explanation just before I posted this!] So, here are some photos, for those who, like me, have never seen it before!

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2012 St Josph’s Novena Trolley

Special thanks to all of the beautiful families who welcomed us into their homes, Sefathia for organizing the Trolley, Bob Ryan from CATA and Eddie Salah who donated his time to drive the Novena Trolley and our trolley mates who did the 2012 Novena crawl.

The work put in by these families is truly astounding and we are all honored by the welcoming by each and every house and huge props go out to the women, men and children that keep this tradition alive.  You are what makes our community special.

Kim Smith will do her usual knock out job covering the entire thing in a much more refined manner than my stuff but it will take a bit for her to chew through all the footage.

In the mean time, I’ll be doing a separate post each day from each family, some had more coverage than other from me as while The Bean and Snoop Maddie Mad were still with us I wanted to spend that time with them.

First off, the Trolley-

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Click the slideshow below to see the larger sized pictures of the thumbnails-

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Video with Sefathia explaining what it’s all about-