For Americans, Christmas is the centerpiece of the holiday season, and overall the single most-celebrated holiday. For Russians, there is a vague awareness that December twenty-fifth is a holiday of some sort, and the “Russian Christmas” which falls on January sixth is pretty much only observed by those who are at least nominally Orthodox. But that doesn’t mean my teammates and I were about to forget Christmas.
It was going to be different, I knew that – my first Christmas away from home, and I got pretty well away. And it was different, but not too different, just enough to remind me how much has happened in the last year. But a lot of things were the same.
I wanted a tree; we had a small fake one somewhere in the apartment, but that wouldn’t do. Decorating real trees in the home isn’t as common here, but they do it, and trees are available. I and a friend from church came across a stand the Saturday before Christmas, and with his help, I successfully haggled a quarter off the price of the nicest tree the guy had, a solid eight-footer, reasonably full. That made the apartment Christmasier. My teammate cared more about other decorations, and his work resulted in light strings over doorways and tinsel and ornaments on the walls. It looked lovely.
Christmas Day was quiet, but comfortable. I managed to bake my family’s traditional Christmas morning breakfast: apple-pie coffeecake. It’s an involved recipe, but I succeeded grandly. My teammate and I read the Christmas story from the Gospels while it baked and sang a few of the great Christmas hymns, and feasted.
He went to an afternoon dinner with other friends and I had a restful afternoon while listening a lot of times to a beautiful choral arrangement of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” In the evening, all my teammates and I and many others attended another dinner party at the home of an administrator at the school where the girls work. Food and singing and so much food and games and laughter abounded. Christmas Day: success.
But the biggest event of this Christmas was the next day: party at our apartment for students. We’d invited most of our classes, and from the enthusiastic response received, we expected about forty to come. We have a large apartment and were excited to put it to use. All day we cleaned and decorated and prepared snacks and games and chairs and lights, the four of us working together – my roommate and I, with our other teammate/co-teacher and one of the girls who doesn’t teach at the university. We poured a lot of work into being ready for this evening.
And then only thirteen students came. But it was a great party all the same, only there was lots of food left over at the end and we all fit in one room – not a problem. Students came from both classes shared by the three of us teachers and one group I have to myself. We played silly games uproariously, laughed a lot, kept up a steady conversation that shifted about in terms of amounts of English or Russian being spoken, ate sausage and cheese and brownies, admired the apartment, talked about school, celebrated with all. They laughed when I said I’d carried the tree on the taxibus and when I made faces in the camera and when I showed them how to cut out and frost a sugar cookie. They laughed a lot. So did I.
It wasn’t just fun and games, though: we sang a mix of songs, moving from “Jingle Bells,” the lot of us making quite a bit of joyful noise, to “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The girl sitting next o me commented on how sad a song it was and I had just time to add briefly that yes, it is, but it’s about hope, not hopelessness, and then it was back to “Holly Jolly Christmas.” We showed “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which none of them has seen, and in the short discussion that followed, we made sure the true meaning of Christmas, according to us and the Bible, was not lost. Some students paid more attention during this part than others, but many were clearly listening. What impact that will have, none can say. That ended the planned part of the night, but most students stayed to play Mafia (traditional Christmas fun, no?) or talk until ten before taking their chocolates and candy canes and leaving. It was clear that everyone who had come had enjoyed themselves greatly – the other thirty who’d said they’d come missed out, but there was no use being sore about that.
So I’d never had to make the coffeecake myself, or even so much as left my own property on Christmas Day (if the sledding hill in the field behind our yard doesn’t count), or planned as big a party as that before. But there were songs and meals and celebrations and reminders of the joy that we have because of the miracle of the Incarnation, the gift of a Savior, and Christmas this year lacked nothing. Also, I wasn’t inundated with the same cloying music in public for a month. But for most people, nothing was very special – some people still work on Christmas, and many of our students were taking exams then. They were all looking forward to the real big holiday: New Year’s Day. But that’s another story.