On Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Nostalgia
We don’t celebrate Christmas in Russia - at least not the way Americans do.
To start with, because Russian Orthodox Church didn’t recognize the Gregorian calendar (because that change was imposed by the very Catholic Pope, whose authority it obviously didn't recognize), Russian Christmas gradually shifted from December 25 to January 7 as Julian and Gregorian calendars fell more and more out of sync. And when the October Revolution brought Bolsheviks to power, Christmas was banned as an example of a superstition the new, Soviet people were supposed to transcend.
In 1930s, this was relaxed somewhat. People were allowed to do the non-religious parts of Christmas on New Years Eve - the exchange of presents, decorating the fir tree, the grand dinner with the family, the dressing up in costumes (that last part is uniquely Russian). After Soviet Union collapsed, people started celebrating Christmas again - but, by that point, people have been doing the New Years Eve As Secular Christmas thing for generations, so January 7 became a strictly religious holiday, the time to celebrate the birth of Christ, do all the religious things people weren’t allowed to do. Which I kind of like. This may be probably is my cultural biases talking, but it always seemed weird to me how, in these United States, the celebration of present-giving coexists uneasily with the celebration of Christ's birth.
When we came to America, the Western-style Christmas was one of the holidays my mom embraced. Not the celebrating the birth of Christ part, but the part where we do the present-giving and the big meal on December 24, and where we’d wake up next morning to find our Christmas stockings filled with candy. There were some Russian aspects - like the fact that our Christmas dinner looked more like a New Years Eve dinner, or how we’d watch classic Soviet New Years movies in between courses. And we still marked the New Years Eve with a nice meal,
At least, that was the way it was at first. But as my siblings and I started getting significant others and going off into college, things slowly but surely started to change. I spent 2005 New Years Eve with tweelore’s family - she spent that year’s Christmas with us, and it seemed only fair. As annanov and vladiatorr went to college in Western Illinois and Quad Cities, respectively, it became harder to organize get-togethers in general. And it became more complicated still once Anna and Vlad graduated college and we all moved out. Forget trying to meet for Christmas and New Years Eve - just meeting for one was becoming more and more logistically complicated.
Last year, we wound up getting together for, as I put it to kaffyr, an evening of present-giving, because it really wasn’t much else. And this year, thanks to what my people would describe as an unfortunate convergence of circumstances, we couldn't manage even that. At least not with me, my mom, Anna and Vlad in the same space.
During what turned out to be a pretty stressful Thanksgiving, I was listening to my mom and Anna quietly talking as it became clear that any kind of Christmas get-together simply wasn’t going to happen, and heard Anna mentioned that she felt bad for ruining my mom’s Christmas. And I… well, to be honest, at the time, I was too mentally and physically exhausted to think much of anything. But thinking about it later, I realized that while my mom loved Christmas… Christmas, in on itself, didn’t mean much to me.
When I try to think of Christmas, my mind drifts to my family New Years Eve get-togethers in our old apartment back in St. Petersburg, about heading to Grandma Kima’s apartment on New Years Day to celebrate her birthday. Thinking about it - in my heart of hearts, the Christmas celebrations were always New Years celebrations that happened to take place on a different day, much like we usually couldn’t celebrate Victory Day on May 9 (because, well, in these United States, May 9 is just a regular day, so we usually had to celebrate on the nearest weekend).
The prospect of not doing anything for Christmas doesn’t really bother me. But the prospect of spending New Years Eve alone bothers me profoundly. I remember when, back in 2006, my mom and my siblings went to New York on the final week of December and I was left all alone on New Years Eve… That depressed me. To the point where poor Lore basically had her brother take me to a New Years Eve party he was attending. (Not one of my proudest moments, to put it mildly).
Ever since I moved to Chicago, I tried to meet up with Vlad (who is at least in the same city as me) for New Years Eve, even if it’s only for a few moments. It didn’t feel right for to see Vlad spend New Years Eve without at least one member of the family around. And it didn’t feel right for me to spend it without at least one family member.
On Friday, my mom, Vlad and I met up to exchange presents and I found out that Vlad would be doing a NYE party gig… The more I sat on it, the more the thought of spending it alone bothered me. I didn’t think I was going to come unglued the way I did 11 years ago, but it was still a sad thought.
I didn’t like the fact that we didn’t have a dinner, but I figured out that it probably wasn’t going to happen months ago. I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t get to give presents to Anna and John and Nadya (who got some nice Russian-language children’s books Anna can read to her), but… it is what it is. The logistics just weren’t going to work out. But that sadness had nothing to do with Christmas and everything to do with doing New Years things I remembered fondly from childhood.
Since I started writing this post, I found out that I may at least be able to spend a bit of New Years Eve with one family member. Which, I admit, made me feel better than I did when I started writing this. Granted, it’s all tentative, and it depends of circumstances beyond either of our control, so.. we’ll see.
Either way, I’m going to try to find some place where I can drink and non-alcoholic drink and wish Grandma Kima a Happy Birthday. It has become my new tradition, and I want to try to hang on to what traditions I can.
Because I don’t want this post to end on a completely depressing note… To those who celebrate non-Orthodox Christmas (secular or otherwise) - Merry Christmas. For those who don’t, I hope you have a great rest of the holiday season, one way or another.
As my people would say - to new happiness!