Russian Orthodox Church against Father Christmas
Despite the difference in calendars that means Russians celebrate Christmas on 7 January, since Soviet times on New Year's Eve the population marks the arrival of Ded Moroz, or “Grandfather Frost” who descends from the frozen banks to cheer children with gifts. This narrative - with ancient roots in local culture, but too similar to what happens in the West - is now increasingly criticised by Orthodox preachers who urge people not to “confuse” children.
The Russian Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on 7 January, which corresponds to 25 December according to the old “Julian” calendar introduced in 46 BC by Emperor Julius Caesar.
It was corrected by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, and its rejection by the Russians is linked to the establishment of the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1589, intended to show their loyalty to traditions as opposed to the “innovations” of the Latins, and becoming one of the most symbolic elements of the contrast between East and West in religious practices.
Many Orthodox Churches have since accepted the “papal” calendar, and since last year, Ukraine has also officially proclaimed the Gregorian date as the Christmas holiday for the whole country, further irritating the Russians, who complain of the “persecution of their faithful” by the hated enemy who has sold out to the West.
One consequence of Christmas in January for Russia has been the popular exaltation of New Year's Eve, experienced with all the typical euphoria of Western Christmas, which Russians contemptuously call Krizmas (Christmas), the triumph of consumerism and relaxed spending.
However, evoking pagan rituals, Russia also celebrates the arrival of Father Christmas on 31 December, not the jolly red-suited man on a sleigh pulled by reindeer, but Ded Moroz, “Grandfather Frost”, who was also popular with the Soviet regime, dressed in worn dark green clothes, who descends from the frozen shores of the Arctic together with Sneguročka (Snow White) to cheer up children scattered across the vast Eurasian territory with gifts.
He is also matched by Baba Yaga, the Russian Befana, who is not relegated to a specific date, but arrives after the start of the new year to unleash the Svjatki, the “holy days” when masks are worn for two weeks, the true Russian folk carnival.
In the 1990s, now free from the constraints of Soviet state atheism, Russia rediscovered religion and ancient traditions, and at the same time was “invaded” by Western customs and traditions, including the excesses of Christmas and its advertising propaganda.
With the advent of Putin's sovereignism, “Gregorian” Christmas celebrations are increasingly reviled, leaving Catholic and Protestant minorities to celebrate on weekdays, when the president, the government and the Orthodox Church organise all kinds of activities to help people forget their connection with the rest of the world.
From this year onwards, it seems that even the Russian Ded Moroz is provoking reactions of repulsion, as in the condemnation of the “wave of New Year's passions” by one of Moscow's most influential parish priests, Protoierej Feodor Borodin of the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian, a church where until recently the most ecumenical faithful of Russian Orthodoxy gathered in the centre of the capital, heirs of the great “spiritual father of dissent”, Father Aleksandr Men, who was killed in circumstances that have never been fully clarified in 1990.
Father Feodor described belief in the arrival of Father Christmas as ‘unacceptable for a Christian’, which is in fact ‘a deception incompatible with faith in Jesus Christ’.
His statement was immediately supported by many senior members of the patriarchal clergy, such as Father Vjačeslav Kljuev, president of the All-Russian Committee of Orthodox Parents, according to whom “telling children about Father Christmas is a grave sin and deliberate deception”, because in this way “parents create an imaginary world, a fantasy world, which sooner or later will be dispelled”.
The story of Ded Moroz is a ‘quasi-religion’ that was deliberately promoted during the Soviet era by the atheist system in order to erase all traces of Christianity, instilling ‘belief in the non-existence of God’.
Another priest from the eparchy of Ivanovo in central Russia, Hieromonk Makarij (Markiš), called for ‘a clear distinction to be made in children's minds between this bearded grandfather and St. Nicholas the Wonderworker’, the much-loved patron saint of Russia who gave rise to Christmas legends.
These statements were later confirmed by an official representative of the patriarchal structures, the vice-president of the department for relations between the Church and society, Vakhtang Kipšidze, who proposed to ‘commit those who talk to Father Christmas to a mental hospital’, undertaking to “disenchant” the myth of the New Year, paving over all ‘metaphors, false images and inappropriate symbols’.
In this way, he insists on rationalising faith and “not returning to the conditions of primitive man”. Some time ago, the then deputy patriarch and metropolitan Ilarion (Alfeev), now in exile in the Czech Republic, proposed finding ways to make the figure of Santa Claus “acceptable at the ecclesiastical level”, defining him as “a figure exalted in the Soviet period as Ded Moroz, but who descends from the story of St Nicholas of Myra”.
In the early 2000s, the powerful mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, identified the northernmost town of Veliky Ustyug as the residence of the Russian Father Christmas, and the Orthodox Archbishop of Vologda, Maksimilian (Lazarenko), even proposed symbolically baptising the hero of winter fairy tales, which proved impossible to achieve due to his prompt removal from the episcopal see following his statements.
The Orthodox hatred of Father Christmas is provoking rather confused reactions among the Russian public, where there is an obsessive insistence on the importance of “traditional values”, excluding from them such a beloved figure as Ded Moroz and all the mythology associated with him, which even in Russia descends from very ancient narratives.
As Aleksandr Soldatov, correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, wonders, this could lead to “believers in Father Christmas” being defined as members of a “terrorist organisation”, as has already happened with the Satanist sect.
In Russian chronicles and folklore, there is no clear indication of a connection between the cycle of festivities around the winter solstice and Grandfather Frost or Snegurochka. New Year's rituals similar to those of today only began to take hold under Peter the Great, with the move of New Year's Day to 1 January 1699, “following the example of Christian nations”.
A royal decree also prescribed decorating houses with pine branches for Christmas, but this custom was slow to catch on widely. It was not until the mid-19th century that the symbols of the Russian New Year took shape. Thus, thanks to the efforts of Russian fairy tale collector Aleksandr Afanasev and poet Nikolai Nekrasov, the evil spirit Morozko was transformed into the good Moroz.
Modern folklore scholars see parallels between the East Slavic Morozko (also known as Morok, Studenets or Zyuzya) and the Hunnic deity Yerlu, who descended to earth on New Year's Eve. Morozko-Morok brought severe frosts that destroyed the winter crops, so he had to be appeased with pancakes and flatbread.
Another folkloric prototype of Ded Moroz is also a rather gloomy character: Ded is an ancestor who returns home in the form of a spirit or ghost during Svjatki. This Grandfather also needed ritual food, and if he liked it, he protected the house; otherwise, he sent disasters.
Perhaps the first positive interpretation of this image was offered in the 1840s by the writer Vladimir Odoevsky in his children's fairy tale “Grandfather Frost”. Children would go to his hut in the forest to invoke the arrival of spring.
During the Soviet period, in the Stalinist years, there was an attempt to appropriate these fairy tales, following a 1935 article by Pavel Postyshev, then deputy secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which he called for “organising a beautiful celebration for our children for the New Year”.
The image of “Grandfather Lenin” began to appear on Christmas trees, and Stalin's cult of personality was also associated with the good Ded who brings gifts, in a Soviet ritual celebrated even at the House of Soviets in the Kremlin, centred on a solemn figure of Father Christmas very similar to the Georgian dictator.
Now, the Ded Moroz so despised by the Orthodox has nothing to do with Putin's presidential celebrations, as he did not want to revive folkloric symbols to avoid excessive confusion.
Father Christmas has returned to the lands of the far north, taking on transcendental dimensions that infuriate Patriarch Kirill and his collaborators, who, when the real Orthodox Christmas arrives, feel increasingly sidelined because of that damned Roman emperor's calendar.
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22/11/2005
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