Christmas is not a “white” one this year! It’s rather greyish, and in some places even green – at least around the town of Brusyliv, in Zhytomyr Region, where winter wheat is sprouting up in the fields.
Still, the mood of Ukrainians is snowy and joyful. In this kind of mood, children usually go sledging or have snowball fights. In the villages, the onset of evening reveals which houses are inhabited by young families.
Chinese garlands, 30 or 50 meters long, have become popular, as they light up the facades of houses in otherwise dark streets. Many homes have decorated spruce trees standing in their front yards, and those who don’t have evergreens have adorned apple and pear trees with hung Christmas decorations.
The festive season in Ukraine lasts a month – from St. Nicholas Day, Dec. 19, to Epiphany on Jan. 19. You’ve got to have enviable health to celebrate for an entire month. Those whose constitutions are dubious, cut down the festive period to just two weeks: from “European” Christmas to the Ukrainian one, so from December 24 to January 7.
For true believers in the birth of Jesus, preparations for Orthodox Christmas include a 40-day fast! And, you can continue celebrating for weeks after Epiphany – right up until Pancake day (known as Maslenitsa, or Shrovetide)!
But first, you have to live courageously for more than a month without meat and alcohol! Then, on Christmas Eve (Jan. 6) you put a spread of 12 meatless dishes on the table and gaze at the sky waiting for the appearance of the first star.
Ukrainians are not big fans of restrictions, no matter their background – from the church or the government – how can you fast on New Year’s Eve? What about jellied meat and Olivier salad with champagne?!
It’s fair to say that Christmas is the highest peak in the mountain range of festive season celebrations rather than the main and only winter holiday.
On Christmas Day itself you cannot clean the house, you cannot refuse to help if asked, and you cannot hunt or fish. Traditionally, it is housewives who make sure these rules are observed, with their husbands knowing very little about all this.
At the Christmas dinner table, a usually strict housewife generously allows her husband some vodka or wine, though it doesn’t mean she has decided to let him get drunk on Christmas! It’s simply a way of ensuring that the idea of hunting and fishing will not occur to anyone.
There has always been a big difference between New Year and Christmas celebrations. New Year is a noisy, mass holiday, with fireworks and champagne. Christmas is quiet, a time for the family.
Both holidays have been victims of political repression. In 1915, Tsar Nicholas II banned New Year’s celebrations, declaring them a “negative German influence.”
The Bolsheviks, having got into power by deposing the tsar, allowed the “Holiday of the Christmas tree” to reemerge and even came up with a new name for the holiday – “Red Christmas tree”.
It was to the “Krasnaya Yolka” to see the children in the village of Sokolniki that Vladimir Lenin was traveling from Moscow on Jan. 6, 1919, when he and his guards were robbed by the infamous Moscow bandit Yakov Koshelkov. On that day, Lenin was left without a Browning, money or even a car, but still managed to reach the children in Sokolniki.
For peasant children at that time, the New Year holiday was something exotic and foreign. Christmas was more familiar. And if you spotted the fact that Lenin was en route to visit the kids not on Dec. 31, but on Jan.6, that is, on Christmas Eve, then it becomes immediately clear that the Bolsheviks’ plan was to replace Christmas with the New Year.
While the war waged by the Bolsheviks in Russia against Christmas and religious holidays was more or less successful overall, in Ukraine the 1917 revolution and the end of World War One gave new impetus to the national liberation movement.
Hopes for an independent Ukraine had become a powerful incentive for the revival of folk traditions, including those of Christmas. Mykola Leontovych, Ukrainian composer and lecturer at Kyiv University, spent 20 years arranging and re-arranging an old Ukrainian carol by the name of “Shchedryk”.
In January 1919, at the request of the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Ukrainian Republican Choir was created in Kyiv to acquaint Europe and the world with Ukrainian music and culture. “Shchedryk” became the choir’s signature tune.
The Choir went on a tour of Europe in March 1919, never to return. In September 1922, the conductor and founder of the choir, Oleksandr Koshyts, left Poland with some of the singers to tour the USA, from where they never returned.
On Oct. 5, 1922, “Shchedryk” was performed for the first time in America at New York’s world-famous Carnegie Hall. And the English version – “Carol of the Bells” – was first performed in New York at Madison Square Gardens, in March 1936, by a choir under the direction of Peter Wilchousky, an American conductor of Ukrainian origin.
It was Peter Wilchousky who wrote the English text of the Christmas carol. That’s how this Ukrainian Christmas song became a global Christmas hit.
What an example of cultural diplomacy!
The history of this song and the story of the Ukrainian choir’s seemingly never-ending tour of the USA under the direction of Oleksandr Koshyts is now being compiled into a book by researcher and writer Tina Peresunko. It’s the topic of her Fulbright visiting scholar project.
Personally, I’m really looking forward to reading this book and think it will be the perfect gift for Christmas 2023!
Until the book hits bookstores, please find “Shchedryk” on YouTube or another platforms and listen to it in any version: in Ukrainian or English.
It creates the perfect Christmas mood.
