Despite the ongoing war – four civilians were killed in Russian bombings on the southern city of Kherson – Ukrainians are trying to find some light this holiday season. Especially since the official date of Christmas has been officially transferred from January 7 to December 25.
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From our correspondent in kyiv,
Two religious traditions juxtapose in Ukraine: Orthodox Christianity and the Greek-Catholic Church, present in the east of the country. However, the Russian Empire and then the USSR imposed in Ukraine the date of January 7, when Orthodox Christmas is celebrated according to the Julian calendar. This usage has continued in recent decades, but in 2017, a few years after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in Donbass, the Ukrainian state decided to officially introduce the date of December 25 into the calendar for get closer to European uses.
Until last year, the two Christmas holidays coexisted, with Ukrainians choosing the date they want to celebrate the nativity with their families. There are no real official statistics to know whether the date of December 25 was imposed, but it is absolutely certain that since the start of the large-scale invasion in 2022, many Ukrainians categorically refuse to celebrate Christmas on the same date as the Russians.
Not in the mood for celebration
A young mother recently told us that she was not particularly religious, but that she considered it a political gesture to celebrate Christmas on December 25, because it was a question of symbolically associating herself with all the countries of ‘Europe.
Here too, no objective data, but on Sunday December 24, we saw a lot of Kievans shopping for New Year’s Eve, which was not at all the case a few years ago.
But after almost two years of war, Ukrainians don’t really have the heart or the morale to celebrate Christmas. Many Kievans are now psychologically incapable of celebrating or simply enjoying something. The entire society is totally traumatized by this war, by the constant presence of violence and death, and in this context we do not want to put a red hat on our heads.
However, many Ukrainians do something for New Year’s Eve, sometimes pretending a little, for one reason: to give children a sense of normalcy.