Christmas Books and Songs in The Ukrainian East
In December 2024 I came for Christmas to Kharkiv. My favourite holidays in my favourite city. Dark muddy weather met me at the station. On the main square a soberly pessimistic billboard read, “To the New Year of our struggle!” Demure sorrow seeped through every pore of the city. Ruined baroque fortress towns on the edge of the region – Vovchansk and Kupiansk — floated like ghosts, people who fled these towns settling in. And the open wound of Pokrovsk, the little perfect railroad town of Donbas, pulsated at the back of my mind — another microcosm destroyed for the sake of the great russian culture. The evil stood outside, throwing sneaking greedy glances and guided bombs into our windows.
At a Christmas classical concert in a 19th century wine cellar of the old Kharkiv fortress, a literary scholar Yaryna Tsymbal presented a new book of Ukrainian Christmas Classics. She presented an over-the top gilded green volume with the words,
“During this time, the coldest saddest time, we are all looking for a miracle. Our eyes search for that first star in the sky to break the deepest darkest night.”
She could not be more in synch with the city mood. The local Philarmonic singers sang the Ceremony of Carols Benjamin Britten wrote on his trip across the ocean during WW2. But it was one of the last pieces, an old Ukrainian military carol from 1918 that struck the audience.
“In 1918 the young Ukrainian national republic sent a choir as a foreign embassy across the world to raise money for weapons for our young army,” — the conductor said. — “This military carol was in their repertoire then, and it is in ours now.”
My friend laughed hysterically, hopelessly, “nothing changed.”
In 2023 I shared some reflections on the changes in my family traditions. We then changed from the old Julian calendar and joined the rest of Christians to celebrate Christmas on 24 December, and I wondered if such a change could ever become an organic part of our life. Now, taking the heavy volume of Ukrainian classics into my bed, hiding under the blankets from the cold that settled in the apartment after a massive russian attack on Kharkiv heating infrastructure on 25 December, I felt the new tradition getting rooted quickly. Russia used a truly festive amount of missiles.
Christmas Classics that helped me on that day, opened with a Christmas Eve by Mykola aka “Nikolai” Gogol, but I didn’t feel like reading his exoticizing depictions of fairy tale Ukrainians this time. I leafed through to Olena Pchilka’s series of short stories instead. At school, we learn that Olena Pchilka is the mom of our most influential female writer Lesya Ukrainka. Olena herself, meanwhile, was a talented short story author. Her texts are sharp and psychological, catching the moods of the 19th century Ukrainian society.
In a story, Disrupted Supper, a young peasant boy is sent to his aristocratic godmother with “kutia” — a traditional porridge — then to his godfather, a peasant imprisoned in suspect of pillaging aristocratic mansion. As the boy watches arostocrats making fun of the old peasant traditions, the boy throws the gift they present to him, a five-penny coin into the window, driving the aristocratic family to paranoia as they are afraid of being attacked by the peasants. The boy returns home in deep disappointment, promising to grow to “beat the aristocrats”.
Pchilka’s Christmas stories weren’t published during the Soviet era, seen as religious and strangely disruptive to the Soviet editors. Perhaps, the idea of a miracle, or a hope for one, was too much for the society of materialists. Most likely, it was too specifically Ukrainian. In Masquerade, a young married woman dreams on a New Year’s eve, that she goes to the masquerade in her household “Ukrainian dress”, which her husband smirks at as “not proper for the lady”. At the masquerade she, on the other hand, is treated with much attention, unveiling hidden longing of the converted Ukrainian aristocrats for their national identity. Every now and then local traditions take heroes of Phcilka’s texts to places they deem unreachable — a rich people’s home, a ball, or decoration of a Christmas tree at a rich house. In Pine Tree, a peasant boy is invited to decorate the tree with the rich kids. Chocolates, nuts, wrapped in golden foil, apples and candles are put on the tree for the children to take as much as they can, and after a game on the same Christmas Eve the tree is thrown away. The peasant children take it to their home and mimic the ritual, with what leftovers are still there on the tree.
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Reading about miracles, I remembered my friend’s words, “of course, no miracles exist, and yet we want during this time to believe in them, in something.”
On Christmas Eve 2024, since our parents decided not to celebrate any Christmases, a friend invited me to a Kharkiv home that was about to be sold. The sense of mourning enveloped the beautiful old designed candelabras, as we moved the boxes to find a place to sit. Saying goodbye to your home is a repeated heartbreaking plot in the city. People hold on, and hold on, but then feel it is time to let go, and devote themselves completely to their new lives elsewhere, further from the war.
The mood was fittingly strange, surreal, muddy. A guy joined the party, with his own tragedy, and the dinner became a circle of consolation until we all started to remember the most hilarious moments our Kharkiv past.
I sat and listened to a story of a pregnant girl wandering ceaselessly about Kharkiv in the first year of war. She walked the streets after coming back from abroad to give birth in Kharkiv. So that her child was local, was of this city. She walked the streets every day, soaking the magical, bizarre feeling of what Kharkiv is about so that her child there inside of her knew this city on a spiritual un-conscious level.
We all at the Christmas table shared the knowledge of Kharkiv from a magical side of it. United by shared friends and myths, we nearly missed our 11 o’clock curfew time, running home like Cinderellas.
Woken up at 5 am by a massive Russian missile attack, I counted the explosions in my hallways, between the heartbeats. The book of Christmas Classics in my arms, as protection charms. With the heating gone after the missile strike on the nearby station, I went to decorate a Christmas tree at my parents’ who celebrate New Year only, and who conveniently had the heating.
Another book got into my backpack — non-fiction research of the Witches of Kupiansk. Surprisingly detailed descriptions of the differences between the born and the make-shift witches, alongside a step-by-step guide of how to breed a witch-killing dog, made me think of the level to which our ancestors in the 19th century believed in miracles. A woman on the metro next to me talking to herself, and me reading a practical witchcraft-catching guide, made up for a strange scene for sure.
Decorating, we watched Home Alone, the most relatable children movie of all times, dealing with the fears of abandonment and flooding of your home with strangers and distant relatives.
In the upcoming days music continued to be a powerful solace. A Lviv band, Pyrih I Batih, who had become regular visitors to Kharkiv, played their new album of carols, divided into kolyadka (Christmas) and Shedrivka (New Year) songs. In the comfort of a concert designated bomb shelter I could relax. Here, we could spend an eternity, hiding from the nuclear war if that would have happened.
As the New Year approached, the tremor settled. We all knew the previous years’ celebrations were filled with russian attacks across the country. And I thought of poetry, the most irrational, most miraculous medium of all. Two poets could calm my Easterner’s soul on those days.
In 1932 Mykola Zerov wrote his elegantly nervous verse, Divination.
The magical city held its breath, waiting for the miracle. On December 30 I remembered another poem, by a living breathing author Serhii Zhadan, who I happened to have seen twice that week. On one occasion he took part in a philosophical discussion on a new “Executed Renaissance” the term he didn’t support, feeling contemporary Ukrainian writers could at least shoot back. A concert in a stuffy little cellar pub, also a bomb shelter, also went haphazardly in anxious talks about what it meant to be a Kharkiv local. We went to all those tiny sheltered concerts for two weeks of Winter holidays, to stop thinking, but thoughts, fears, gnawing feelings of dread, overwhelmed.
Why didn’t Zhadan read that poem, I thought. In this poem, entitled Fronline City Before Chirstmas, Death comes to look at the festive table. A boy comes to her and invites Death along, to see “all our riches”,
“I”, — the boy sayd, — “feel no fear and no submission,
Look how much light there is in this golden space,
Enough for all the birds’ nests and snake’s holes.”
As long as “Death is standing with them”, with all the citizens of the city,
there is no death, no disasters and misfortunes,
The lights are on,
Pets go to sleep,
Winters go on.”
Not accidentally, Death is a character of a traditional Ukrainian carolling procession. it is often embodied in a dress-up figure of a boy, Kolyada, or a goat’s mask is often put on one of the carollers, to make sure evil spirits don’t touch the company seeing that Death is walking with them. And so, in these last days of the year 2024, I thought of the magic spells, Death, the goats, and old traditions to bring kutia porrige to the table (a similar porrige is cooked for funerals, and kutia is in fact a porrige made for the spirits of dead relatives). These little magical elements of Death were something we could shield ourselves with from the horror of endless enthropy, the fear that our culture, literature, songs and rituals could vanish with our bodies. In hope this would not happen, we waited for a miracle.
In the morning of December 31, 2024, I went to my family home, to try uncover the old recipe of great-grandmother’s pies. Legends say, pies with cheese and cottage cheese covered the sacred kutia porrige as children brought it to their godparents. Who was I, a grown-up atheist from the 21st century, in a city so fragile, so horrified, yet so hopeful, who was I to disturb the rites of passage of the old Ukrainian lore? A friend of a friend decided not to sell their home, I learnt. In a spirit of hope that one day they could return.
