Unlike most of our readers in English, most Ukrainians still have a couple of weeks to wait before celebrating their Christmas according to the Julian calendar. They are now gearing up for New Year’s, to which the Soviets in their zeal for militant atheism moved many of the attributes we associate with Yuletide to that secular and therefore for them far more acceptable time of merrymaking. It is on New Year’s that cards are sent and gifts exchanged, but local children already got their foretaste of gifts on St. Nicholas Day. Here Santa Claus was retooled as Grandfather Frost, but he still looks very similar to the St. Nick so familiar to Americans. Like the early Church Fathers, the Communists knew that the easiest way to adapt people to something new was to incorporate as much as possible of what was already familiar.
For the Ukrainian emigration the existence of one Christmas celebrated by almost everyone else and one of their own posed something of a problem, which most members of that community have solved quite sensibly: celebrate both. Besides, celebrating according to the Julian calendar makes it possible to do one’s Christmas shopping during the after-Christmas sales. How sensible!
Here, having busted their budgets for the New Year, now as commercialized as any Christmas season elsewhere for those who can afford it, most tend to opt for a more traditional Christmas, one more in line with the spiritual and folk customs the holiday had in the First World before the celebration of Christ’s birth turned into an orgy of conspicuous gift-giving. The young carolers will set out, as often as not dressed as angels; people will go to church; and then the table will be laid with the traditional twelve dishes, beginning with kutia, a traditional mixture of boiled wheat, poppy seed, and honey that must be everyone’s first bite.
As an American with a Ukrainian family, I am going for the solution worked out long ago by my Ukrainian- American friends and am celebrating the American way now and will later try to get to my wife’s native village for “her” Christmas. In this country New Year’s is best celebrated in the city, staying at home until the stroke of midnight and then going out to visit whomever one pleases and partying until dawn. If somebody is home, the door is always open. Ukrainian Christmas is best spent in the village, where one can get a feel for the treasures of this country’s folk culture, rooted as is Christmas itself (the holiday seems to have been introduced to supplant the Roman Saturnalia, when the celebrations also included exchanging gifts) in various pre-Christian celebrations of the winter solstice. After all, nobody knows when Christ was born, and some calculations indicate that even the year is off by four. But here it is just the beginning of the Christmas Cycle lasting until Epiphany. But most of us will have to get back to work by then. Alas!
Every silver lining, of course, also has its dark cloud, and even the most joyous of holidays are no exception. Those of us whom circumstances have forced to live far away from those near and dear to us miss them now as at no other time. I have a fourteen year-old son in the Washington suburbs and an 89 year-old mother in Oklahoma. The exigencies of modern life has forced this situation on many of us. I wish all my readers the merriest of Christmases, but to those of you in the same situation I wish a special dose of holiday cheer. And to my son, who might even from time to time visit on the Internet, I wish the merriest Christmas of all.
