Rebekah Koffler: I Lived Under Soviet Communism and It Taught Me to Love Christmas

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Growing up in Soviet Russia, I didn’t know what Christmas was, let alone celebrate it. Every winter we did, however, celebrate the biggest holiday of the year – New Year’s. All across the country, between the end of December and mid-January, major festivities were held at schools, kindergartens, universities, and places of work, with singing, dancing, and lavish decorations.  

For a couple of weeks each year, you got transported from an otherwise harsh and dreary Soviet reality into the magic of holiday cheer, with fireworks, marching bands, streetlights and firecrackers. The centerpiece of the holiday was the New Year’s Pine Tree (Yolka) that decorated every home and workplace.  

My sister and I relished the moment when we helped our mother decorate with ornaments a freshly cut Yolka that our father brought home. And we couldn’t wait to go to mom’s workplace to dance a khorovod around the lit-up tree and get a translucent sack filled with candy and one tangerine – a big rarity back then, especially in winter – from a bushy eye-browed and long-bearded Grandfather Frost and his granddaughter Snowgirl. It was a fairytale that became real, albeit just for a few short days. 

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What I didn’t realize until my early twenties was that the Soviet government did indeed feed us a fairytale. In my fourth year of college, I was one of very few students sent on an exchange program to London. That December, to my astonishment, I learned that the British celebrated something called Christmas, with a Yolka called a Christmas Tree and a Grandfather Frost called Santa Claus, but without the charming granddaughter. Instead, he had a sweetly innocent reindeer, Rudolph. On December 24 and 25, the Brits