Christmas in Russia

December 25th, 2016

This blog post contains no pictures or videos. Sorry, not sorry.

Christmas time in Russia is usually celebrated on January 7th, mainly because the Russian Orthodox church still uses the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar, so it's skipped ahead by a few weeks, putting it well past new years.

According to my host mom though, it makes no sense to use the old calendar, and mess things around when we have the new calendar, and christmas should not be celebrated after new years. So we celebrated on the 25th.

It was a quiet affair. My host family had some of their friends over, and there was a party with soup, fruit salad, lots of fruit cake, mandarins, cookies, and some sort of fruit pastry (of which I probably ate the most out of.)

We opened presents right after our little dinner, and I got my host mom 1984 (in Russian), and my host sister Harry Potter (6th book, in english.) In return, they got me a calendar, and a poem collection of Владимир Высоцкий, who is a famous russian poet/actor/musician. I enjoyed it way too much.

Then my host sister and her friends started singing carols, of which I knew the tunes of, but not the names of the songs. Also, since they were in Russian, I couldn't tag along. Oh well. They wanted me to sing Santa Claus is Coming to Town, but they lost their train of thought when it came time to drink tea and chat. Thank you host mom for saving me!

And that was pretty much it for the night. I didn't take pictures, because I left my phone in my room, and I haven't left the apartment much, thanks to a minor corrective surgery that made it extremely uncomfortable to walk. Thankfully, I feel much better, and will be planning to go and do things very soon!