Chasing Santa: Orthodoxy's Second Christmas

The prospect of going to Russia for January didn't seem to be the best idea I ever had. My friends said I was crazy. First there was the snow, then there were the numerous warnings I received that Moscow is dangerous/expensive/filled with gangsters and large men who would kick my ass if I looked at them wrong. No one I knew in Europe wanted to come visit. It felt like I was alone in the club with Napoleon and Hitler (not the best of company) who decided that it was a good idea to conquer Russia in the dead of its most notorious season. Although I wasn't going just for the fun of it. I was going to study during January at the Moscow Higher School of Economics with two other equally dumb Americans who want to learn Russian and take a politics class on post-Soviet policy and development. Okay, well that doesn't sound very exciting to most people either, but it is to me, so humor me.

There was one factor that I completely forgot about: Christmas on the Orthodox calender is the 7th of January. The malls, streets and advertisements were flooded with images of Santa, last minute deals, and jolly (as jolly as Russians can be sober) people indulging in Western's spirit of Holiday Capitalism. For starting almost 60 years behind the US, Russia sure has made up for the lost time. My first visit to the mall was a dizzying experience of shaking the cobwebs off of my cyrillic alphabet skills trying to read what ended up being the same companies (Baskin Robbins, McDonalds, Calvin Klein) that we have in the US. I saw women wearing heels that hookers would shun, accompanied by stern-looking men who seemed to exist solely to intimadate. I began to notice that Russians are very keen on Western culture, yet paradoxically very insistent on their way of doing things. Christmas is still Christmas—but replace Grandma's good bottle of wine with some Russian Standard vodka, change the alphabet, and push the day of celebration to 13 days later. Voila! Russian Christmas!

Now excuse me, it's very cold and I need a little bit of vodka before I go out to brave the weather.