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Saturday morning, you and your husband are sitting in the living room drinking coffee and looking for a couple or more blankets to warm up.

All of a sudden the kids begin to nag: “mommy, it’s boring!!!”, “Daddy let’s go for a walk” Your husband is looking at you and you are looking at him and you both come to the conclusion that they are really right. That the winter is coming, doesn’t mean that the only walk in Saturdays is the walk of the fingers switching channels on the TV.

You begin to bring up options to entertainment, and every minute that passes a new option is cancelled.

You have used up the grandmas, you have been in all the movies, and a restaurant is too tiresome for the children, and so, there goes another Saturday. Sleeping a lot, PC and boredom. With a feeling of frustration on the children’s side, and a feeling of a miss on your side.

But this is exactly what we are here for. To inform you about the most thrilling activity this season, a big festival for all the family. And no, we are not speaking of jumping among puddles as the son suggests. Olives harvest!!! The event you will most prefer this winter!

Olive harvest takes place only once a year, from the onset of autumn, starting October-November up to January. You can find lots of places in the country, mostly in the far north where you can walk, enjoy the pastoral view and fill containers with olives (for a small fee that differs from site to site).

There are a few methods for manual olive harvest: using a basket when picking the olives one by one, motions of “milking the trees” or laying a sheet (Nylon, cloth, net or burlap) on the surface beneath the tree.

The atmosphere at the olive harvest is really unique, awarding much more then just some harvest of any other food source. The trip has an additional value. The olive is connected to our land, to the unquestionable icons of the country, to our heritage as a nation. Olive trees live longer then most of other fruit trees. The olive tree can reach the age of hundreds of years, and so does this activity that links among generations without difficulty as the father teaches his young child how to harvest the fruit and how to distinguish between ripe olives to unripe ones, and explains him how, after all this, his most liked oil is extracted and the mother of course doesn’t cease to take pictures.

After some hours of heavy pounding the olive trees, a thrilling physical activity, and new jokes that you made up, you return back home, tired but satisfied, but you are not alone… together with you, inside the car, are your olives, that you picked with your own hands and they are not a few.

But what do you do now?

The olive is a bitter fruit and not fit to eat right after harvesting. The color of the olive depends upon the degree of ripeness of the fruit – green olives are unripe, and the black olives are the most ripe.

Therefore the olives go through a process of pickling. Home pickling is a long process that takes about two months, but it is very simple. All there is to do is to buy a glass jar with a lid, to sprinkle salt, garlic, lemon, hot pepper, and a lot of patience.

When you taste it, you get addicted. You get to understand how valuable every moment has been. From the fatigue of after harvest and till the long time of waiting. At the end of the we sit all together, eat an olive after an olive, without the power to stop and leave a glass jar full of pits, until the next fun time….