Santa Doesn’t Come Here. New Year Does.

Father Christmas will not save you in Moscow in late December. Emily Tamkin, writing in Foreign Policy in 2016, opened with the fact visitors keep getting wrong: Ded Moroz does not drop presents on 25 December, and he will not do it on Orthodox Christmas on 7 January either. He and Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, belong to New Year’s Eve — the night that in Russia is the new year and the secular pieces of Christmas, trees and gifts, rolled into one. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Christmas entry is the calendar underneath: many Eastern Orthodox churches that keep the Julian calendar for liturgy celebrate 25 December on what the Gregorian calendar calls 7 January.

Bogatov’s Morozko is the older temperature of the same name: a bearded frost in a wood, drawn for a book of Russian tales in the 1890s. Tamkin, following Valentina Izmirlieva of Columbia, starts further back than the Soviet tree. Christmas became a Christian feast in Rus’ with Vladimir’s baptism; in Orthodoxy it has always come second to Easter. New Year as 1 January is younger: Peter the Great, in 1700, accepted that Gregorian date. Izmirlieva told Tamkin the first celebrations were “kind of a modest thing.” German habits seeped in later. Pine, Tamkin writes, had been read as a sign of death, not something to drag indoors. In 1817 Nicholas I’s Prussian-born wife brought a tree into her private rooms. In the 1820s there were palace gifts for royal and poor children, first from St Nicholas, then, by the late nineteenth century, from the fairytale patriarch Father Frost — “a lot like old St. Nick, except he has a three horse carriage and is a bit less jolly.” By mid-century, trees and lanterns had left the palace. Then 1917 arrived, a hundred years after that first indoor pine, and the new state had no use for a holy night.

The night the tree changed jobs

The early Soviets tried a Komsomol substitute; Tamkin notes that it did not take. By 1928 Christmas was banned and 25 December was a working day. Wikipedia’s account of Christmas in Russia, drawing the same arc, puts a 1929 decree against religious holidays in the Stalin years, and then the turn. In 1935 a celebratory tree was returned to Soviet children — not as Christmas. Soviet leaders, Tamkin writes, linked it to a secular new year, “future-oriented,” a match for ideology. Ded Moroz came back. Snegurochka, out of folktales, became his assistant. The blue seven-pointed star of imperial trees gave way to a red five-pointed one. The night acquired a civic liturgy: a clock, champagne, the hymn, gifts, parties. Izmirlieva’s sentence is the one that still holds: the New Year “has become so ingrained in the society, it is unifying.” It is for those who are not Christian, those who are anti-Christian, and members of other religions.

Vasnetsov’s 1885 costume sketch is Frost for the opera, a stage grandfather in a decorated coat. The Soviet pageant borrowed that height and that beard, then gave him a civic job on 31 December. The granddaughter arrived with him.

The New Year has become so ingrained in the society, it is unifying. It’s for those who are not Christian, those who are anti-Christian, or members of other religions. It is still very strong.

Vasnetsov’s Snegurochka stands in a winter wood as if she had always been there. She had not, not in this job. Christmas returned to the public calendar in 1991. Religious and “even pseudo-religious” Russians, Tamkin writes, do keep 7 January. The big night is still 31 December. The New East Digital Archive’s history of the yolka adds a post-Soviet twist: in the 1990s Veliky Ustyug began to sell itself as Ded Moroz’s hometown, against the encroachment of Santa, and in 1998 the mayor made a postal address official. The man in red from the North Pole is an import you will see in malls. He is not the clock the country waits for. GLONASS has even run a Ded Moroz tracker on New Year’s Eve, a cousin of NORAD’s Santa map: the joke is the point. The state still knows which grandfather the children are writing to.

What the week actually is

Russians often take the stretch from New Year to Orthodox Christmas off — новогодние каникулы, the New Year holidays. The New Year itself uses the Gregorian calendar; the church’s Nativity does not. That is why a Western visitor can feel they have missed Christmas twice: once on the 25th, which was never the main gift night, and once by leaving before the 7th. Tamkin records a small surviving game: some people write a wish, burn the paper, and drink the ashes in champagne. Treat it as a cousin of older New Year divination, not as a sacrament. Olivier salad, tangerines, and a televised clock are more widely shared than any one spell.

How to hold the night

If you are invited for New Year, you are invited for the hinge of the year, not for a quiet dinner. Gifts travel with Ded Moroz, which means they travel with midnight. The tree in the corner may still wear a star that remembers 1935. The church on the 7th, if anyone goes, is another calendar sharing the same week. Do not correct the table by wishing people a merry Christmas on the 24th as if you had brought the true date. You will have brought the Western one. The Russian night that stole the tree, the grandfather, and the presents did it on purpose, under Stalin, and then kept the loot because it worked. Izmirlieva says it is unifying. That is a historian’s compliment to a secular feast that still feeds a country of mixed faiths and none.