С Новым Годом! (The holiday season in Russia)

I got the great opportunity to return to the States for 2 weeks for Christmas so I'm not currently in Russia, but since I have some time, I figured I should backtrack and fill you all in on Russian Christmas, or rather, on Russian New Year, which is kind of the same thing, but not quite.

So because of the Orthodox calendar, among other things, December 25th is not a holiday for the majority of Russians. You're probably asking: How do the Russians make it through the long winter without a cheery holiday strategically placed right near the darkest day of the year? What what about the Christmas tree? Santa? Presents? Got 'em all. It seems that some Tsar some time ago decided that rather than celebrating 2 holidays back-to-back at the end of December, some consolidation was in order. So Santa, presents, even chopping down a tree and planting it INside your house shifted down a week and now somehow resides with midnight countdown and champagne glass clinking. Which is to say: New Year's Eve has everything. Interestingly, while some traditions span the culture, there are a few variations in the realization of them. My teenage students asked me incredulously why we would possibly hang our socks on the wall by the fire, while I wondered how Santa entered the Soviet-style apartment blocks without chimneys. Having never really thought about it, my students replied that he just comes in through the door.

Anyways, December was a busy month (hence the scarcity of blog posts), but I enjoyed the increasing amount of lights decorating the city, and it's been great to see family and friends during my holiday in the States.

I asked my 10 year olds to "Make Christmas" with just some random school supplies. This is what they came up with.

A tree at Sokolniky park

Trees adorn the streets of Moscow.

Outside of Gorky Park

Festive lights along the street of Dolgoprudny

Street decorations in the city.

Friendsgiving-belated

Hi faithful followers,
My apologies that it's been over a month since my last entry! I guess nagging works, because I can only stand so many emails signed "blog entry?" "Where's the blog entry" "No blog entry in December?" instead of the traditional "Love, Dad". (Sorry, Dad).

Anyways, it's been a busy month, as December often is, but I have an hour before my flight home (!!!) boards, so I thought I'd catch you all up on the last month in the life of Molly in Moscow.

One of the things I anticipated being the hardest about living out of the US for a year is being away for the holidays. I'm lucky enough to be going back for Christmas, but it turns out the Russian calendar of Federal holidays doesn't really care when the Pilgrims broke bread with the Native Americans, so I worked on Thanksgiving. While my youngest students did make hand-turkeys and I got a chance to Skype with my family post-the big meal, that Thursday didn't really feel like Thanksgiving.

Fortunately, I wasn't the only ex-pat who was feeling unfestive. The search for a large turkey proved fruitless, and our options were some expensive "baby turkeys" or good old chickens. Since we were planning to feed a verifiable army (approximately 30 people), and most people either didn't know what they were missing or didn't care, we opted for the chickens. 6 of them.

The 6 chickens, before

Mid-prep, we needed 2 ovens to cook them all!

Cooked, maybe as good as turkey!

So we had close to 30 people at our "Friendsgiving". Many were Americans, craving the food and friendship of the holiday, but many were friends from abroad, mostly Italians and Russians, who were curious about Thanksgiving and wanted to share it. Because of its international nature, our Thanksgiving had a mix of traditional Thanksgiving food, cranberry sauce, stuffing, mashed potatoes, etc, but it also had some traditional Russian and Italian foods, including, herring under a fur blanket, salad olivier, and others.


Here's our table:

Of course, no Thanksgiving would be complete without the pie. We tried without success to find pumpkin, so pumpkin pie was sadly absent from our meal, but I did make an apple pie from scratch. No big deal.

All in all, it was a great day. While it was still hard to be away from family on this holiday that's mostly about family, getting to share this tradition with new friends, many of whom had their very first Thanksgivings, made it just a little bit easier.