Christmas and Changing Traditions

Ukraine Moves Official Christmas Day Holiday to Dec. 25, Denouncing Russian-Imposed Traditions

 I read Talia Zajac 's When Traditions End: On the Changing Date of Christmas and Ukrainian Identity from Public Orthodoxy, thinking it represents so many ideas. How traditions identify us, and their change affects us. All of this regardless of the practicality of the change. It reminds us that Russia wants to do harm to people, not just make a smart real estate deal per Donald J. Trump. Then, too, there is how we carry with us traditions that we might not even be aware of until their loss.

For many Ukrainians living in the diaspora, following a separate calendar was also a form of preserving identity and culture. This was the case with Ukrainian diasporic communities in Canada, in the United Kingdom, or in Poland, to name a few countries. Keeping separate holidays, different saints’ days, helped bind religion, language, and culture together in a way that preserved a distinct sense of being Ukrainian amid assimilation pressures facing any minority diaspora groups.  And I know, intellectually, too, that it is not only because a calendrical change is needed, but for this reason of simple survival— as a church, a people, and a sovereign nation— that the hierarchy of the Ukrainian Catholic Church has decided that now is the time to make the calendrical change from the Julian to the Gregorian. To survive now means that Ukrainians have to distinguish themselves in a new way.   And so, while I get ready to celebrate on December 25 and try to remember that Saint Philip’s Fast was supposed to have begun already on December 15, and that I must make my Christmas dishes early this year, I also mourn. I mourn for the state of war in the world, I mourn for the lives needlessly and brutally taken this year, I mourn for the loss of a tradition of timekeeping stretching back thousands of years, for the joy and sense of unique identity this tradition brought to me, my family, and the wider Ukrainian community. It is one more thing Putin has taken. In this regard, Nadiyka Gerbich and Yaroslav Hrytsak in their recent book Ukrainian Christmas offer a poignant reflection on this ongoing war, “This war has been described in different ways, but here is the definition we offer: the country where Christmas is one of the most significant holidays of the year and is celebrated twice […] was attacked by the country where Christmas has lost all meaning.”

Read the full essay, then think about it. 

sch 12/24