"Where will you celebrate the New Year?"

This question has haunted me since childhood.

It would seem, what to ask in the late 80s, in a small provincial village, where there is only a factory cafeteria from restaurants. At home, where else. New Year's Eve presupposed a feast, for which they began to prepare in September, and in general it was not customary to roam the streets - at most, after midnight, go out into the courtyard of a panel five-story building, launch a couple of dead fireworks and return to the "hot" one. Well, to be honest, for us children, New Year's Eve was not enveloped in any special magic: the tree was decorated by that time,.jpgts were presented, costumes for the school masquerade were sewn, put on and removed. Songs about Santa Claus have been sung and even tangerines from the bags given out at the school matinee have been eaten. We knew that closer to midnight or immediately after us they would drive us to sleep so as not to interfere with a real adult holiday with the Blue Light, ambiguous toasts and a quarreling married couple - and someone on New Year's Eve would certainly quarrel, with doors slamming, drunken tears the kitchen and the suffering face of the hostess, who hunched over the stove all day, and only picked the meat in French, because they ate salads.

Then, already in adulthood - hungry 90s, again, it would seem, what to ask. Where will you meet? At home, Christmas tree sticks, with confused parents and their equally confused friends, horrified by the same salads that were given to mom even more difficult than during the late Soviet deficit, and desperately dreaming of being in a fairy tale called "Home Alone". Let it not be about New Year, but about Christmas, but it is beautiful, rich and the bandits are funny. But this is not all, and it is not clear what will happen tomorrow.

And so on, through the well-fed noughties in our covid times: where will you meet? How will you meet? With whom? What are your plans for the New Year? Two salads, hot and a cake. These are my plans. Nothing has changed since the 1980s. I just won't put the Christmas tree, I have a cat.

What about Christmas? What are you going to do with Christmas, asks the collective unconscious, traditionally going crazy around November. Advent outside, did you buy a calendar? Decorated the house? Did Stollen bake it? It must be done ...

Yes, I decorated the house. I have a Christmas house in which I stuff an oversized light bulb in the evenings, a wreath with bells on the door, and a hefty banner with the face of the baby Jesus to hang on the balcony, but I'm shy. I have hung a.jpgt sock on the mantelpiece, although the only person who will put anything there is myself. And I'm not doing this because I'm looking forward to a Christmas miracle. And certainly not because she is in the least religious. And because only that I got used to it: the two weeks framing the night, when one year will be replaced by another, cannot be ignored. You can't just take it and say: this time of year is no different from any other, except that the weather is worse and more money is spent.

Well, okay, you can’t and you can’t. And it's not that I don't like all the expensive fuss about helping brighten up the darkest time of the year. As the glamorous stylists of the late gloss said, first of all, it's beautiful. But here's the thing: putting a Christmas wreath on the door, I caught myself thinking that two salads on the New Year's table are somehow not enough. Olivier, "fur coat", there is still something to cook and be sure to buy caviar. And the jellied meat is already for Christmas. Not the one with a wreath and a toe over the fireplace, but ours. Jellied meat and bean pie, because January 7 is also Kings Day.

So these are my plans for Christmas, New Years, Christmas and Old New Years: celebrate everything. Stollens, English muffins, pies, pancakes, gingerbread and turkey. Santa Claus, Snegurochka, tangerines, Let it snow, "Five minutes", "Irony of fate" and "Die hard" - all mixed up in the Oblonskys' house. And it’s not that I, a former Soviet child, baptized in Orthodoxy and wearing a papier-mâché squirrel mask on the school tree, now live in a Catholic country. There is, frankly, also sparsely Catholic here, except perhaps the architecture. And no one expects me to hang a banner with a baby, even the locals don't hang it especially.

It's just that I, like that squirrel, drag everything that I see into the house: two Christmas, New Year, Valentine's Day, March 8, Diwali ... Once a year I trudge a hundred kilometers to, according to the ancient Celtic custom, to death with thorns, chop up the flowering gorse and hang it from the ceiling. The Celts believed that the gorse is the embodiment of a certain deity who protects the house from evil spirits. I don’t know what to call the deity, I’m also unfamiliar with the spirits, and the only thing that gorse does is it falls from the ceiling for months by the collar.But you know what? I'm not the only one. Advent, gingerbread houses, Rudolph the deer - and then the battles of Olivier and the smell of tangerines, and the English cake, which is prepared almost six months before serving ... Not only one in my head has a porridge from traditions, or rather - their material symbols, because , well, let's be frank, buying up these gingerbread and advent calendars, we are practicing a cargo cult. Because, well, let's be honest, most of these traditions are unfamiliar to us and not particularly interesting. We finally got the opportunity to make ourselves like in the movie "Home Alone": firstly, it's beautiful. And it seems that our time has come to feel nostalgic for the times when tangerines were a holiday, but the parents are young. Therefore, Santa Claus, Olivier and "Irony of Fate" are like in childhood.

And it all looks so weird, you know. It’s like some crazy editor took and glued pieces from Harry Potter, Ordinary Miracle and an IKEA commercial and shoved us all into it. And we run, fuss and stick to each other with the question: "How will you celebrate the New Year?".

In fact, this is a rather curious moment: in the absence of our own intelligible tradition, we try to mold something from the old and the alien, and at times it turns out to be funny and fun. But more often it is all the same strange, because what Advent, what stollen, what, to hell, gorse from evil spirits - what do we have to do with all this? What remains? Chuk and Gek, blue taiga, the film "Girls"? Consumer aesthetics of the late USSR with smoked sausage and Riga balsam? No thanks.

We have few holidays, really few. Those who are not on duty, like Defender of the Fatherland Day, and not by gender, like March 8. And the real ones, such that one would like to celebrate.

And there are few traditions, which is why we so readily cling to everything that glitters - and that, of course, is beautiful, what is ugly in the Christmas wreath at the front door. And this is especially felt when those who have been dear to these wreaths since childhood ask: how do you Russians usually celebrate Christmas and New Year?

How how. Two salads and hot.

This New Year was given to you, you, one might say, do not celebrate it at all. You unfortunate people do not have such a tradition. And we have. Be jealous.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.

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