Russian Christmas Rozhdestvo

The December holidays including Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanza, are magical ones, celebrated worldwide in big cities and small villages alike. Holiday traditions abound and memories of this special time fill our hearts throughout the year. Hopefully, these memories are not of purely materialistic things, but of the little things that truly matter.

I suppose that my fondest recollections of the Yule season date back to childhood, a time without cares or worries, when I anxiously awaited the arrival of not Santa Claus, but the Russian Santa called Dyed Moroz or Grandfather Frost.

It was difficult as a child to reconcile the fact that due to a difference in church calendars, that is between the Julian and the Gregorian, Russians celebrate Christmas or Rozhdestvo on January 7th instead of December 25th for a difference of thirteen days. For those of you unaware of the difference, the Julian calendar was a solar calendar introduced in Rome by Julius Caesar in 46 BC after consultations with astronomers. It is referred to as Old Style, but due to miscalculations with the leap year, the Julian fell out of sync with the solstices and equinoxes. The Gregorian was a revision of the Julian calendar introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory and is known as New Style.

The Russian Orthodox Church nixed the idea of the Gregorian calendar and stuck by the Julian which resulted in a difference of thirteen days. Hence, I was out of sync with many of the children I attended school with, but later on I was able to capitalize on the after Christmas sales and was also granted an additional day off thanks to the religious holiday.

Papa decorated the house with lights, Mama added the fresh pine wreaths and made Christmas cookies, and my sister and I contributed ornaments that we made in school. One year, I hung a bell made from a glitter covered egg carton. It was glorious!

We’d get our Christmas tree or yolka in Russian, on December 24th, Christmas Eve. Otherwise, we’d be left with no tree at all unless it was artificial. Decorating the tree was great fun: the tinsel, lights, delicate glass ornaments, all topped by a beautiful star were brought out from the boxes in the attic. The tree would be lit nightly and we'd wait excitedly for our Christmas in January: it would never come quickly enough.

My sister and I opened our presents on Sochelnik or Christmas Eve and were delighted to discover that Dyed Moroz knew exactly what we had wished for: a doll, toy, game and a pair of mittens and a scarf. Besides, we had been so good all year!

On both, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we went to church and afterwards joyously celebrated with our extended family. Mama prepared a huge dinner and Papa would pick up delicious desserts from the town bakery. My favorites were the napoleons: cream nestled between sheets of pastry and topped with a thin layer of chocolate.

My sister and I would pray for snow too, and I’d glance out the window in the morning to see if the roofs were covered with snow. Sometimes we had a white Christmas and other times, Christmas was warm and green.

Often, we’d breathlessly recite a poem or play a Christmas carol on the piano before we opened our presents.

My favorite to recite and sing was about the Christmas tree, the yolka. It went something like this in Russian:

V le-soo rodeelass yolochka, v le-sue ona rosla
Zimoy ee letom stroynaya, zelenaya bye-la

Myetel ey piela pesencoo spee yolochka bye bye
Moroz snezhkom oocootieval smotri nye zamerzai

True-seeshka zauka serenki pod yolochkoy skakal
Poroyou volk, serditye volk, riestsoyou probyegall

Vezet loshdka drovenkii a v drovnyech moozheechok
Sroobiel onn nashy yolochcoo pod samye koreshok

Ee vot ona naridnaya na prazdneek nam preeshla
Ee mnogo mnogo radostee deteeshkam preenesla.

The translation of the poem:

In the forest was born a fir tree, in the forest she did grow
Through winter and summer shapely and green she was

The blizzards sang her lullabies: sleep little fir tree bye bye
The frost cuddled her with snow -- be careful not to freeze

A little gray rabbit jumped beneath her boughs
At other times, an angry wolf ran by

A horse carried firewood and a little man
The man cut our fir tree, right to her very root

And now for the holiday, so lovely, she came to us
And brought all the children much joy!



Indeed, the simpler times are remembered with fondness and joy whether or not Christmas was white or green or any color in between. Funny thing, it often snowed on Russian Christmas and some of my friends conceded that there was a remote possibility that the Julian calendar was the "true" one!