One father had three sons. When the sons grow up, he gave them the same number of chips each and sent out them into the world. One son when to a casino and spent all his chips, the other son opened a casino and made much more chips, and the third one was stupid enough to fall in love and marry his beloved. The father disliked his son’s wife very much: her age wasn’t right, she dressed badly and made strange food, and he even treated his grandchildren with some of coldness because of this.
But when the father grew old and seriously ill, the first son didn’t come to see him (he practically ruined himself by drinking by then), the second son sent him money for treatment, and the third son came to him with all his children, that is, the grandchildren. And the sick father, that is the grandfather, kissed them all on their shaggy heads, and cried, and was happy, that is, he behaved in exactly the same way as the third son had behaved all his life, despite his father’s disapproval and his apparent lack of material well being.
Although the father died in the end, of course, just as all the heroes of this story have died by now, and just as we will die some time.
Here’s another tale that resembles a true story – or a true story that is very much like a tale.
In a far away overseas kingdom there once lived a king. He was young, handsome, he loved his queen, and his daughter the princess, and they were happy. But the evil enemies secretly sent a young witch to the king, and she bewitched him in the Oval room of the Royal Palace, and for a time the king forgot about his family. Those who sent the witch spread the story of the infidelity all around the kingdom, the queen grieved and the princess was upset, and the king, to save the throne and the family, tried to renounce everything that happened. The king’s subjects didn’t hate their king, but they wanted to know the truth – because they weren’t without sin themselves and secretly rejoiced at the fact that the king also wasn’t: because if he is allowed to sin, then so are they. But when the king told the truth, they didn’t rejoice for too long: because in the old king’s place there came a new king who wasn’t that young, intelligent and handsome, and dragged them into unprecedented wars and calamities. And they understood that the cruel truth is not always better than a merciful lie. And they started remembering the kind and handsome king and bemoaning their intolerance.
In some other kingdom the subjects of one not very happy king had to marry, if they wanted to become boyars. Which they did from time to time, although among themselves they only boasted of their lovers, who they didn’t love, in spite of the word. What they loved was for their mistresses to produce an impression on everybody by the size of their breasts, their age, and the color of their hair (blondes were fashionable in the kingdom). The mistresses, in their turn, only boasted the size of their lovers’ wallets (or sometimes the shopping they did in some overseas kingdom). And even their children – strangely enough they did have children sometimes, although it happened less and less often – the boyars taught that the main thing was to make more chips, and the one who didn’t have enough chips in his pocket was a loser. So when the king abdicated, and the new boyars came, the old ones didn’t have a place to go: their mistresses left them, and their wives didn’t need them by that time.
Now that tale was too sad, and I’ll tell another story.
And to prove that miracles don’t only happen in fairy tales - and fairy tales are not always about miracles, as we’ve seen above – I will get to the true stories as I promised.
I have a childhood friend, let’s call him Lesha. I had always liked him a lot, and he had liked me, I knew all his secrets and he knew mine.
And once Lesha decided to marry, why? – well, because everybody around him was marrying, and he had been living with one girl for a year by that time, so it looked like a good idea to make it all official.
The girl, to be honest, wasn’t the most interesting of his girlfriends, and at the stag party before the wedding, to which I was naturally invited as best man, I even asked him (especially as there were only two of us at the stag party):
- Lesha, do you love her even a little bit?
And in reply I got:
- Don’t be silly.
I wasn’t silly any more. Especially since the wedding took place in a small city where Lesha lived, and he rented a restaurant, and they served Russian salad and inedible dry overdone pork, vodka, and danced to music by Valery Leontyev, and the relatives were invited and one of them, an ancient woman, blessed the newly-married couple, which, in the absence of an icon, she almost did like in the classics with the portrait of the writer Lazhechnikov.
And so they started living in an official marriage. And, incidentally, Lesha drank, just like everybody around him. And his wife put up with him, as almost all the wives did in that small city. And then hard times came, when his job and money disappeared, but Lesha, despite his lack of money and the birth of his child, started drinking even more, and his wife put up with him again. But something different was growing inside him, because once he got up sober in the morning and went very far away in search of a job, and there slaved away for peanuts from morning to night, but he couldn’t do otherwise because somewhere far away his wife and his child were waiting for him, and it didn’t matter what he wanted or what he could or couldn’t not do, and how much he wanted to drown his sorrows in vodka - because he turned out to be of a much stronger kind, tried by centuries.
The kind whose wife and small child wait for him behind the high mountains and the blue woods, and who fights the evil monster and has to beat it. And Lesha beat his dragon. And he even saved some money. And his wife and child moved together with him. And I can’t say that it went all that well financially at once, because they had to live at other people’s places, and (as I found out later) they sometimes literally didn’t have enough money to buy bread, but despite all that, they had one more child, because, if you went through all the hardships with a person who is very close to you, and that person can give you a child, then you have to have that child so that you are even happier.
And so I once came to see Lesha, and we had another stag party, and were sitting in the bathhouse over a few beers, and he suddenly asked me if it had ever happened to me that sex felt disgusting and repulsive, although everything has seemed to go fine.
It doesn’t matter what I replied to him, but he told me how once on a business trip he accidentally ran into a girl who he had an affair with even before he married, and who was, in my opinion, not just the most amazing of all his girlfriends, but also the most amazing of those I’ve ever met. And it so happened that they were alone together after so many years. And what happened happened. And after what happened, he asked me if it was possible that you could feel disgusting after intimacy with a strange woman, when you’re happily married yourself.
Because precisely that second that he felt disgusted, he suddenly realized, not even with mind, but with all his self, what bliss that was that he was married to his own wife, and how happy he was with her, and how he loved her and the children – and everything that is called by the word “home”, even if you don’t have one of your own and live at other people’s places. And he realized how important it was to preserve that happiness, to defend it, and not to subject it to idiotic dangers, giving way to the stupid “come on, are you a man or what?”
And Lesha - my Lesha, who I hadn’t ever seen crying even when he was beaten in fights as boy – was sitting next to me in the bathhouse with moist eyes.
I love going to Lesha’s place. They have this really good thing there: all the generation come together, and all feel good in each others company.
A horrible thing that has been going on in our kingdom lately is the segregation of different generations. When the old people only spend time with old people and curse the young for their licentiousness (and the successful middle aged for having “cleaned out the country”); when the young only hang out with the young, because there’s nothing they can talk to the old about; when the restaurants and the clubs are filled with 40-year-old guys exclusively with 20 year old companions, it’s all artificial separation, it’s dividing the people according the number of chips in their pocket, it’s not a family, or a home, because family and home unite just like that, for free, simply out of a feeling of love, - but here, on the contrary, there’s no love.
It occurs to me more and more often that if you want there to be more love in the world, you just have to gather as a family. Not for career purposes, but simply because today is Russian Christmas, or the Old Russian New Year. Or simply because it’s the weekend, Saturday, the skies are low, it’s January in Petersburg, the snow falls in tender flakes, it’s early twilight, there are lights on the river, a yellow spot from the lamp on the table, old cups with stamps from the Kuznetsov porcelain factory. We don’t have to put the wick out and confine ourselves in the prison cell of one generation. Why don’t people over 100 try to let their hair down, and people who are not even 20 should not only endure the torture of going through the family daguerreotypes, but experience the happiness of a masochist in doing it. People over 45 should ask people who are 15 for a ride on a snowboard (I tried to ride a snowboard when I was 40 and people who were 20 laughed at me). People who are financially successful should stop getting angry with their parents for soaking their washing in a tub, although they have been given a washing machine a long time ago (and the parents can go on grumbling – they’re so sweet that grumbling even suits them).
We should really do it, honestly. We all have a little bit of the Magi in us on Christmas. We should start some time.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom…
By Dmitry Gubin
THE TIME OF HAPPY DELUSIONS ВРЕМЯ БЛАГИХ ЗАБЛУЖДЕНИЙ
Christmas is a confusing business in Russia. On the one hand, because of the Julian calendar, the holidays here go on for longer than in the rest of the world – and some people who work with western colleagues or have western friends don’t miss the chance to celebrate Christmas twice. On the other hand, the lavish New Year feast is a clear violation of the Orthodox rules, which specify a 40-day Christmas fast “until the first star”.
The geographical aspect
The change in calendar after the revolution led to a contradiction between the spiritual preparation for Christmas and the wish to celebrate New Year with champagne and feasting. The New Year that Russians celebrate with most of the world coincides with the strictest days of the Christmas fast. The situation would be different if the New Year was celebrated in Russia according to the old style – i.e. on the infamous “old New Year”.
In the USSR the conflict was easily solved by mixing New Year and Christmas attributes – Santa Claus, whose origin remained a mystery for most children, and the strange Snow Maiden, whose role came down to assisting the “old man” in lighting the fir tree. The tree is still called the “New Year” tree. In other words, Soviet ideologists created a completely new “mixture” of two celebrations – church and secular, and many people still cannot distinguish the features of one celebration from the other, despite the active role of the state in coming closer to the church and the lack of any obstacles to fulfilling religious needs.
“Not until the first star”
In fact, the difference of 13 days between the new New Year and the old New Year is far from constant. For example, the difference between the old and new styles in 1582, when Pope Gregory introduced the new calendar in Europe, was 10 days, in the 17th century it was 11 days, in the 19th century it was 12 days, and in the 20th century it was 13 days. The question arises whether this difference will change in the new millennium, and whether 7 January according to the new style will still correspond to 25 December according to the old style.
At any rate, the time of the Christmas fast remains the same – it is 40 days when it is forbidden to eat meat and dairy products, and fish from 2 January. It is interesting that the atheist ideologists who created the New Year and Christmas celebrations for the builders of communism, were in many ways guided by much more ancient traditions dating from pagan times.
Christmas, which is considered one of the most mysterious holidays in theological tradition, where you can open the curtains of the present and see the future (Christ, who came to the world in human guise, knew what his path would be – from birth to death and resurrection), is also considered mystical at an everyday level. Christmas Eve has always been a time for fortune telling, when girls tried to “see” their future husband. At this time, forecasts for the harvest and the breeding of cattle were also predicted according to the weather. Black paths were considered to indicate the buckwheat harvest, and a road above the snow in the fields threatened a bad harvest. At night, a rope was tied around the table leg to stop the cattle from running away, yarn was tied in a bunch to ensure the cabbage harvest, and the chickens were not fed to stop them from escaping from their coops. Another tradition from pagan times was carol singing, when children (and adults) went house to house with a “star” (a candle was used for this) and sang songs glorifying Christ. House owners gladly opened the doors and gave the carolers sweets and money – not to accept guests was considered a sin.
Spiritual food and earthly food
On Christmas Eve, food was not eaten until the “first star”, in memory of the star of Bethlehem. Families read prayers and excerpts from three of the gospels (the Book of John does not mention Christmas). On this day, the ritual meal was prepared from red wheat or barley, rye, buckwheat, peas, lentils or rice with almonds or poppies and mead. This meal is also served at christenings and wakes.
Orthodox believers did not have any compulsory Christmas dishes apart from this one. Some hay was placed on the table in memory of the manger were Christ was born. The table where the family sat down after the service had to have 12 dishes: they could include jellied meat, jellied fish, homemade sausage, ham, boiled pork, a side of lamb with buckwheat (the buckwheat is placed on the tray between the ribs and breast of the side of lamb), roasted pork, a Christmas suckling pig, a goose with apples or a duck with marinated cabbage, pancakes, pies, gingerbread, poppy cakes, cookies and a nut cake. The drink known as sbiten was also served: to boiling water (5 l) one added any type of jam (800 g), honey (200 g), ginger (2 g), cloves (2 g) and cinnamon (0.5 g).
The great Christmas reconciliation
Another tradition that was transferred from Christmas to New Year is the belief that New Year is a family celebration. In the West, the opposite is true: families gather on Christmas, while on New Year people gather outside, visit friends and generally have a good time. The main Christmas dish that is baked whole, whether it is a goose, turkey or suckling pig, is carved on the table, as a symbol of unity. From the religious point of view, this is quite logical: Joseph, who saved the pregnant Mary without being the father of the child, embodies generosity and faithfulness to the family. The unity of the family in the face of external dangers, the link between the generations, mutual understanding, the readiness to sacrifice oneself – this is the meaning of the Christmas family dinner. And if the tradition of the Christmas family meal was transferred to New Year in Russia, there is nothing really bad about this. If the family gathers at the same table to show their love and affection for each other, is it so important whether this happens on 31 December or 7 January? And what’s stopping us from observing the tradition on both of these dates?
Tamara Ivanova-Isaeva