“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
No more of Christmas in your heart. You can just go to one of the Orthodox Christian Christmas celebrations.
While most Christmas trees have retreated to cardboard boxes waiting to make a year-end comeback in 2025, all lights of the Nativity cheer refused to go back into hibernation until. January 7 marks an alternate Christmas tradition, namely the Orthodox Christmas, and a very strong one at that.
Orthodox Christmas through the looking glass? Not so much
Approximately 12 per cent of Christians celebrate the birth of Christ on January 7. But why is there a 13-day gulf between the two Christmases? Props to the different calendars. Christianity was initially allegiant to the calendar revised by Roman Emperor Julius Caesar in 46 BC. However, the Julian Calendar had an error in the form of an overestimation of the solar year and it soon had a fallout with the solar calendar. Thus, the Julian calendar gave way to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, authorised by Pope Gregory XIII. The Roman Catholic countries were quick to adopt the new calendar, followed by the United Kingdom and the churches of Greece, America and others. The Orthodox churches of Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Jerusalem, Georgia, and the Coptic Church of Egypt refused to do away with the old calendar, which by 1923, was 13 days behind the new one; Christmas thereby ensuing 13 days after December 25. This interestingly applies to Easter as well, celebrated on April 24, a week after April 17.
Orthodox Christmas is no regional variation, for around 260 million Orthodox Christians, with the largest of the sect belonging to Russia, estimated at over 90 million.
One time for tradition, two times for Christmas cheer
The followers of Orthodox traditions inaugurate the spirit of Christmas with a 40-day fast, also called ‘The Holy Nativity Fast’, leading up to Christmas, “abstaining from meat, dairy, fish, wine, and olive oil.” National Geographic writes, “After a vigil on Christmas Eve, Christmas itself is celebrated as one of the Church’s 12 Great Feasts, with churchgoing and celebration at home.” The traditional meal served on Christmas Eve is a 12-course feast, symbolic of Christ’s apostles, featuring vegetable stew, bread, baked apples, and cabbage soup.
In Coptic Orthodox traditions, it includes “fattah, rice, a bread and meat dish, and wara’ einab (vine leaves). In Russia, the star of the feast is kutya (wheat and rice porridge dish), and according to NatGeo, the dish is “thrown up to the ceiling; if it sticks, tradition goes, you will have good luck”. Ethiopian Orthodox Christians celebrate with wat while Serbian Orthodoxy burns young oak or a branch.
In Kazakhstan, the feast is marked with the nutritious sochivo, a dish in which boiled grains (wheat for example) are mixed with honey, nuts, poppy seeds, and dried fruits.
The families “share sweet treats with their neighbours and families” and also set the tables with white tablecloth to reminisce the cloth that baby Jesus was swaddled in. In Georgia, Romania and Greece, the celebrations include the procession, dubbed Alilo, where the people (including clergymen) walk through the streets in religious costumes singing carols.
The politics of Orthodox Christmas and salvation
“Politics and religion do not mix. They are inherently different activities. Religion seeks salvation, politics seeks power.” Well, this quote is a lost ball in the high weeds, for politics and religion are no longer seeking entirely different things. If anything, the “White Man’s Burden” and “Three C’s of Colonialism” say otherwise. The patriarch of Russia’s Orthodox church only drew himself closer to the patriarch of Kremlin, by choosing to make his views on politics known this Christmas. The Russian Orthodox Church also faced the heat for its decision to form the patriarchate Exarchate of Africa.
In 2023, Ukraine officially shifted their Christmas to December 25 as a strong message to Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox church. The Orthodox church of Ukraine allowed devotees to celebrate the birth of their saviour on December 25 and The Guardian also called the move a “bigger national process of dismantling the symbols of Russia, the Soviet Union and communism”. The situation in Tbilisi, Georgia is no less political, with thousands of pro-European demonstrators assembled before the Parliament to convey the messages of “unity and political expression” through the celebration of Orthodox Christmas.
Christmas, despite the variations in traditions and dates, carries the heavy-mantle of hope for so many communities caught in the bloody-schism of war and wartime politics and crises.
“Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in ‘Brave New Family’ and it does seem true today, in a painful, ironic sense.
