To a Russian, the celebration of the new year is the biggest holiday of each year – sort of our New Year’s Day and Christmas celebrations rolled together. Most of the traditions are familiar to us, from one or the other: decorated trees, present giving, the coming of Grandfather Frost (Russian Santa), crowds in public at midnight, lots of drinking, fireworks, the traditional meat salad, and lots of mandarin oranges. The last one surprised me too, but I like mandarins, so I say it is very well. Never tried the meat salad, though it sounded interesting, from all the ingredients listed by students.
My team assembled a tidy little New Year’s celebration with a few different parts. The best part is the last, though. The girls held a small dinner party at their place in the suburbs, attended by the team and a few others – some university students who’d last year taken my favorite course to teach, from previous Teach Overseas teachers we all knew, a friend from church with her visiting American boyfriend and his sister. The girls made some very delicious Hawaiian pizza, and had oranges. We ate and played cards, and drank a champagne toast, and my teammate and I left at ten.
We were back in the city center by eleven-thirty and made our way to Palace Square, the largest public gathering place in Saint Petersburg. It was your average urban New Year’s, although much smaller – several thousand people, but nothing like the incredible mass at Times Square New Year (a couple million, usually, I think, but I don’t know, and no, I’ve never been, only watched it on television.) Putin gave his usual five-minute speech on television after a concert by some Russian band concluded, all to no great reaction from the crowd. Firecrackers and sparklers went off constantly.
There was no coordinated fireworks display by the city, out of respect because of recent terrorist bombings in Volgograd which the American-centric media have probably barely mentioned – so it was only people’s own fireworks, launched out of wine bottles or mittened hands. Within minutes after midnight, the crowd was melting away. My teammate went home, but I stayed to see the lanterns and fireworks, and then decided to take the half-hourish walk home.
I put on an epic Muse album – if you know that big single “Uprising,” imagine cranking it while powerwalking through a crowd of thousands on a city’s largest thoroughfare (Nevskiy Prospect) amidst fireworks explosions and indistinct foreign shouting. I swear my life’s a music video sometimes.
But halfway home, in a large dark park by the river, I found a small clot of men standing around the Eternal Flame memorial there. I thought I’d stop, briefly, and see what was happening. I stayed from about one until three-thirty. People came and went. Most of them didn’t know each other at all – it was just a small and changing band of people, mostly men, moving through the night from celebration to who knows what. I stayed. I practiced a little bit of Russian (I’m finally learning it a little faster, now I have time to study over break), and many came over to talk, excited to practice their English. Some were barely intelligible, some would in every way have fit in easily with my better college classes, but I tried to understand all and throw in some Russian where I could, to their delight.
So I said “S- Novuym Godom!” a lot and chatted with a lot of strangers and got in the way when the first two guys I talked to, strangers to each other, started shoving, and caught more than one person keeling unexpectedly over toward the fire. People were drinking, but in Russian generosity, and holiday spirit (holidays [wine and] spirits?) they were sharing; someone called out to make sure the American got some – could he shoot vodka? I never had, but hoping I wouldn’t embarrass myself, I tried a very small bit, then a full shot, to polite encouragement. I shouldn’t have, but I gave my phone number to a man who offered to sometime buy me dinner in exchange for speaking practice in English. He’ll probably never call, anyway.
But it got very late and I did finally get cold, so I left the still-busy fire and put the music on again and crossed the bridge through bitter wind, the lone dark traveler looking back over his shoulder at the glorious but corrupt mass of humanity he was leaving behind to the strains of the album’s closing symphony. Like I said: they should pay me to make videos of my life when I play good music.
But why does this matter, and why am I risking finding out I’m not supposed to mention things like alcohol here? Because this is my purpose here, really: to come and live among these people. To join college students and teen and adult students, and lonely nocturnal urban men, and shine a light wherever I go. American tourists don’t get the chance to be where I can be, or to feel that as weird as the night was, it was where I lived – not a postcard memory from a vacation, but another night in the city where I lived. And light will shine, if I let it. Someone asked me to “say what is the truth… About life, about, see, all. In any language.” So I said I believe God made life and the world and us, and wants us to love Him and love each other. The conversation moved on, never came back there, but I put it out. That’s all I can do: live here and seek out my life each day, be at home in the darkness while speaking of the Light. And I did that. And then I slept until noon.
Happy and blessed New Year to all of you. Celebrate and live on purpose, wherever you are. God can use you this year. He will.