How to become a participant in a living Christmas mystery. Yaryna Vynnytska about 12 Christmas artefacts

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What are the traditions of celebrating Christmas? How important are the 12 dishes on the table and without which symbols this holiday is impossible? Lviv Now talked about this and the cultural difference between celebrating the New Year and Christmas with the author of the book «Christmas School», the founder and creative producer of the cultural platform ‘Ark «Ukraine»‘ Yaryna Vynnytska.

Why it’s important to gather at the family table for Christmas

For me, Christmas is one of the most important Christian holidays, and at the same time – a kind of family psychotherapy. I received an injection of love for traditional celebrations from my grandmother, and now, it hurts me to watch us losing the magical world of Tradition. This is a legacy we have received over the millennia, and there is definitely something extremely valuable, even priceless, for us.

I am pretty astonished by the fact that Christmas is celebrated in Bukovel or Egypt. I myself often travelled, lived for a long time in different countries, but the categorical imperative for me was and is to always return to my parents’ house for Christmas or Easter. That’s why you can’t go somewhere for Christmas – you can only come. Come home.

I watch the world globalize, and it hurts me that we are losing our uniqueness – all these Santa Clauses, deer, jingle bells have invaded our space and are displacing our own Christmas attributes. And this is what motivates me to create art books about our traditions. Books are not simple, but special – artbooks with various printing special effects, in order to draw attention to this topic, to present our traditions in an elegant «golden frame».

About the permanence of the tradition of celebration

I believe that the tradition should be preserved and at the same time rethought, modernized, we must add something new to it. Tradition is an open source, not something canned, canonical, unchanging. I watch as ancient traditions are transforming in my family.

My grandmother had great piety for folk culture, despite the fact that she was a citizen with higher education, a settler from the Polish city of Przemyśl, so our family mixed Lviv, Polish, Hutsul traditions: Hutsul candlestick, proskurka (liturgical bread) from Przemyśl, silverware and hay under the tablecloth. All this created a new sub-variant of the traditional celebration – the tradition of Lviv Christmas.

That is why I support the locality, the preservation of local cultural sub-options of celebration, because Ukrainians are quite rich within their Ukrainianness itself: Hutsul Christmas is different from that in Poltava, and Poltava is different from Polissya. The peculiarities of each region should be preserved and nurtured, included in the «red book» of Ukrainian traditional culture.

Every family also has the full right to develop their own traditions. It has the right to find its own way of keeping generations together and the longevity of tradition, but at the same time, add something of its own and create something new. For example, we add an option to celebrations such as Christmas quizzes – family competitions for knowledge of traditions, the Bible, Christmas stories and more.

About what is most valuable at Christmas

The most important thing for me is the fact that all our family gathers at the table on Christmas Eve, all our «dead, living and unborn», and you physically feel the power of your Ancestry. At the festive table, there is always a special place for ancestors – didukh, icon corner in the house, a separate plate with glass and the dishes for the souls that remain on the table after dinner. And this contact with ancestors is a very sacred, even intimate moment of contact with the invisible world.

My Christmas – it’s definitely a proskurka and a blessing from the eldest in the family. The Hutsul three-candlestick is a unique artefact of Ukrainian folk culture. Also – dishes, recipes, family culinary secrets. This is an obrus (tablecloth), ironed «glossy», hay under the tablecloth, and silverware above it. Such a combination of the incompatible – hay from the field and silverware, a combination of city and country.

Ethnographers are always arguing about which tradition is more «traditional» – what and how to do to make everything according to the canon. And I think that the only criterion of canonicity is doing as your grandmother did – that would be right. Your family’s local traditions are also worthy of canonization.

The spirit of Christmas is the spirit of miracle – the birth of God, the art of the joy of coexistence, the ability to accept your family as it is, along with all its strengths and weaknesses. That’s why you can’t quarrel on Christmas Eve because the whole year will be unhappy. You can’t talk out loud at dinner either, and this solemn silence is an important part of the Christmas ritual for me. It is necessary to have dinner consciously, slowly consuming all 12 dishes.

How important 12 dishes are for Christmas Eve

In my opinion, the most important «dish» at the holiday table is love and unity with your family. These are spiritual «dishes». As for the edible ones, counting meals and arguing about their number has already become my new Christmas tradition. Are dumplings with cabbage and potatoes one or two dishes? Can proskurka be considered a dish? And the compote?

My grandmother and I argued about whether to serve the kutia at the beginning or at the end of the Holy Supper. My grandmother, a city lady, treated kutia as a dessert, so she served it «sweet» at the end. I read a lot of ethnographic sources, made my own immersion in this topic and I think differently: kutia is the most important ritual funeral dish. And since it’s the most important, the Holy Supper should begin with it.

However, I am sure that all this is secondary. The main thing is to experience authentic feelings of joy, love, respect for one’s family, for one’s land.

About the attributes of celebrating Christmas

My dream is to make a full-fledged Christmas School, where people would make all the attributes themselves: a Christmas icon on glass, a Christmas spider (straw decoration), Christmas ornaments of paper, etc. All this cultural heritage must be archived and reproduced every year.

I believe that vinshivky (Christmas congratulations) are a kind of psychotechnics, ancient «affirmations» create a certain verbal magic. Nowadays, modern psychotherapy believes that words and thoughts program our consciousness, and thus the future. Our ancestors have known this for a long time and did not tire of programming a rich harvest, a happy new year, a successful marriage.

It is a wonderful tradition to convince oneself that everything will be fine and to give this conviction to others. As for the ancient carols, take, for example, even the same «Shchedryk». Before Leontovych processed it, it was three or four notes, that is, a folk mantra that introduces you to a kind of altered state of consciousness, and then you have access to another invisible world. These are our own folk psychotechnics that we have lost.

About the New Year and Christmas

New Year for me is just another opportunity to go to a disco. According to my grandmother, in her time, no one celebrated the New Year at all. This is a Soviet tradition – a holiday created by Soviet propaganda to supplant Christmas. It was necessary to give people some alternative, and so the New Year emerged. This is a work of Soviet propaganda, as well as Did Moroz (a Slavic Santa Claus) and Snow Maiden, who became «substitutes» of St. Nicholas.

I lived abroad, but I have never seen such a New Year’s Eve frenzy as ours in the post-Soviet space. There, the dominant holiday of the year is Christmas, and the New Year is rather a «residual phenomenon» and an occasion to go with friends to a bar or disco. Lviv was also part of this European-Christian space, where Christmas is the central holiday. The east of Ukraine has come under greater pressure from Russian propaganda, so it is still difficult for people there not to watch «The Irony of Fate» (a popular Soviet film of 1975) and not to cultivate the New Year as the main holiday of the country.

I believe that our tradition should be preserved in its original form and at the same time developed by adding new ones. But let’s not forget the main thing: Christmas is a miracle of the Nativity of God, a miracle of coexistence with all your Family and co-creation of joy.

Read the interactive book «School of Christmas»

12 attributes of Christmas:

  1. Christmas orders (tablecloth, utensils)
  2. Christmas icon (of St. Nicholas, Catherine, Barbara or Christmas)
  3. Family tree (know your family tree and remember all family members at the table)
  4. Magic Candlestick (three kings who brought gifts to Christ, three feasts to visit)
  5. Didukh (Christmas sheaf – a place where ancestral souls live)
  6. Spider (traditional straw decoration)
  7. Vytynanka (paper lace)
  8. Shopka (copy of the Bethlehem stable)
  9. Nativity scene (merry Christmas action with carols and scenes)
  10. Christmas star (attribute of carolers)
  11. Kutia (hungry Christmas table dish)
  12. 12 dishes for Christmas Eve 

Roman Lamanskyi

Translated by Vitalii Holich

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Lviv Now is an English-language website for Lviv, Ukraine’s «tech-friendly cultural hub.» It is produced by Tvoe Misto («Your City») media-hub, which also hosts regular problem-solving public forums to benefit the city and its people.

 

 

 


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