Holiday Spirit

On the 31st of October, on the Eve of Halloween, we had a very special meeting at Yes-Club.
Three American guests came to our club to tell us about main American holidays and discuss them with us.
Their names were Joy Armstrong, Stephen Mackey and Tiffany Lorey.
We started with each person introducing themselves and telling about their favourite holiday. It is curious to know that most people said it was New Year or Christmas. After this, they organized a quiz offering questions about 6 main American holidays. These holidays were St. Valentine’s Day, Easter, Independence Day, New Year, Christmas and Thanksgiving.
The quiz was carried out in a very interactive manner. We got a lot of interesting information. Joy was the main speaker, and Stephen and Tiffany gave additional information. After we answered all the questions in written form choosing from several variants, we checked the answers, each one reading his answer. The most interesting thing to know, personally, was about Halloween, because it was the evening when it was celebrated.
Speaking about American holidays we couldn’t but notice that we had many holidays in common, not only Christmas and New Year. It turned out that an expansion of broadly speaking Western (American and European) holidays in Russia is going on.
Several members of Yes-Club started to speak about their experience in celebrating these holidays. For example, among these holidays are St. Valentine’s Day and Halloween. The opinions on these holidays and sense of celebrating them got split. Some of the members said that St. Valentine’s Day, with exchanging greeting cards about love, with presenting sweets, was obviously a good holiday to adopt. Personally, when I celebrated it at school, I didn’t realize how this holiday originated, but I remember the good emotions that it stirred.
Halloween, of course, wasn’t perceived quite that positively and some people criticized this holiday for connections with “dark forces”. So it definitely wasn’t a good holiday to adopt, as they declared.
Then we started to discuss Russian holidays comparing them with American ones, in a way. We discussed Maslenitsa, its symbols, like pancakes, fires and “straw scarecrow” burned at the end of the Maslenitsa Week. Pancakes symbolize the image of sun and “straw scarecrow” is burned to clean our souls from sins and say goodbye to winter. Vodka and caviar are also indispensable attributes of this holiday. Our American guests were glad to know so much more on Maslenitsa and as they confessed, they loved this holiday.
But speaking about Maslenitsa it became all the more clear that some truly Russian holidays are celebrated more rarely, giving way at first to Soviet holidays and nowadays to American or Western ones, like Halloween.
It should be mentioned that in today’s Russia some holidays are “imposed” on people. Nowadays more people in Russia are inclined to celebrate holidays like Christmas and Easter. Sometimes church holidays are celebrated and officials attend these meetings. But probably this drive for spirituality and church holidays is superficial and just a contribution to fashion.
But the Americans whom we talked to state in the USA many holidays are celebrated without much thinking about its origin and essence. For example 85% of the Americans declare they are Christians but some of them perceive Christmas just like a holiday week and time for shopping at the discount shops.
Russians celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January due to Orthodox tradition. But Russians are inclined to celebrate Christmas on the 25th of December as well, together with the majority of Christians. It is a good example of the fact that Russia is open to cultural influence of the Western countries.
Another example of Western influence is celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween and St. Valentine’s Day. It brings up the issue of deciding what foreign traditions should be adopted and how it should be done. Maybe, we should develop our own national identity because our culture is now in a very transient state and we risk forgetting our own values.
So, let us mould our own perception about the Western and national holidays, even with the help of experience of our foreign guests.