Agria 42. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2006)

Kriston Vízi József: „Újesztendő, vígságszerző… – SMS-ben elküldendő!”

József Kriston Vízi Texted Festive Greetings Studies in Hungarian Literature, as well as publications of a more popular nature, have provided the essence of relatively respectable and indeed acceptable theories on the relationships existing between the various manifestations of folklore traditions occurring at Christmas and the New Year. Rather than being a summary of the taxonomies currently in existence on the subject of the contemporary popularisation of folk sayings and poetry, it is the aim of this study to provide examples of what has been a recent explosion of traditional greetings of a type, often also set down in writing, that has already been with us for many decades. Although the exchange of spoken greetings has been possible by telephone for over one hundred years, it has only become widespread in Hungary over the last twenty years at the most. Mass communication of a rich and varied nature has only really taken off in the last 5-6 years thanks to the mobile telephone. It was this one particular area that we decided to examine when on the last day of 2005 and the first day in 2006 we embarked on a collection of seasonal text messages in an effort to discover the characteristics of those sent, received and forwarded. Our collection activities and our more extensive research into festive greetings are continuing, and is something we hope to publish in future in the form of a special and more substantial study. 388