A bucket (vedro) was mainly a cylindrical or truncated cone-shaped coopered vessel, for carrying water, made of narrow spruce, pine or aspen planks — staves. Coopers preferred to chop wood, because when sawing the fibers were cut, so quality and durability of the product significantly degraded. Staves were fitted tightly to one another and tightened with hoops made of young willow, lilac or bird cherry trunks. Buckets with water were usually carried on a yoke, a thick curved wooden plank with hooks or notches at the ends. The bucket filled with water was hooked first to the back hook and then to the front hook of the yoke.

The duality of the symbolic meaning of a bucket is caused by such a dichotomy as full/empty, which expresses accordingly the idea of wealth, fertility, and prosperity or barrenness, poverty, and hardship. There were some widespread omens: meeting a woman with a full bucket meant good luck, while seeing an empty bucket was bad luck. A bucket as a vessel could be a receptacle for both evil forces and holy water: for example, a pregnant woman was forbidden to drink from a bucket, “else the baby would suffer from heartburn”. If one stepped on the place where the bucket had recently been standing, “the body would be infected with tetters”. On Epiphany, people would fill a bucket with water, dip a cross in it, and wash a calving cow and its calf with this water “to ward off the evil eye”. In divinations and riddles, the female symbolism of a bucket comes to the fore: for example, on New Year’s Eve girls closed empty buckets and said: “My betrothed, come and open buckets.” In riddles, the buckets have mainly a female image: