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Someone is waiting for the approach of winter with joy, anticipating the opportunity to go skiing and play snowballs. Someone – with a shudder, imagining snowdrifts and constant porridge under their feet. December opens a series of winter months, it also ends the year. However, this was not always the case…
December in Russia was called differently: breast, jelly, wind-winter. Breast – from the word “pile”, that is, hardened, crumpled earth from the cold. Together with Christianity, a new word came from Byzantium – “decambrian”. The year, according to the Julian calendar, then began on March 1, along with agricultural work. December with us, like the ancient Romans, was the tenth month, hence its Latin name: decem – ten.
To whom are brothers, and to whom are evenings
For us, December is, first of all, the end of the year and preparation for the New Year celebration. But our ancestors did not always celebrate the New Year at this time – the holiday was postponed at least twice, it was held both in March (according to the Slavic tradition) and in September (in the 1th century, during the reign of Ivan III, it was decided to postpone the New Year on 1700 September). In 1, by decree of Peter I, the celebration of the New Year was postponed to January XNUMX.
At the same time, this holiday was hardly as important in peasant life as it is now. Our ancestors paid more attention to Christmas and Christmas time. What else was important to them in December? For example, St. Andrew’s Day. This year it falls on December 13th. It was named so after the name of the Apostle Andrew the First-Called and was considered a girls’ holiday: on this day, they wondered who would marry first and for whom.
The methods of divination were preoccupied. For example, go to a river or stream in the evening, take water with your mouth and carry it like that, in your mouth, to the house. Then it was necessary to knead the dough on this water and bake a bun. The girls did it in whole companies. As soon as the buns were ready, they were taken out. Then the dog entered the business: they let her in to the baking and watched.
Whose bun she grabs first, that girl will marry the fastest.
To find out the appearance of the betrothed, the girls on the night of Andrei sprinkled the bed with hemp or flaxseed, and so they went to bed. Whoever she dreamed about that night – marry him and go.
On December 19, St. Nicholas of the Winter was celebrated and public feasts were held – bratchina or “Nikolshchina”. Only married men could participate in them, and uninvited guests were allowed only with special permission and paying a fee. There is a mention of the Nikolskaya brotherhood in the epic about Sadko: such feasts were known even in Ancient Russia. They brewed a lot of beer, ate pies, and, having “got drunk”, dispersed, cheerful, to their homes.
Women also had their gatherings – evenings. They began with the Filippov (Christmas) fast – and lasted until Christmas itself. The girls gathered in one hut and, while talking, talking, tales and songs, they spun, sewed, weaved – they prepared a dowry for themselves.
Guys could also come to the parties, but always with gifts: sweets, nuts and gingerbread. And there it was not far from Christmas time. You can read about them in the text about the signs and traditions of January.
Goose for the teacher
December 1 was the beginning of the school year. “From December 1, our ancestors began to teach their children to read and write,” says Ivan Sakharov, a collector of folk traditions and customs, in his Tales. The first day of training looked like this. After the family returned from the church (on this day the Orthodox Church honors the prophet Nahum), the teacher came to the house.
It could be a parish deacon or “another person wise in the book business.” They bowed to the teacher and seated him in the front corner. The father brought his son by the hand, asked him to “teach the mind,” and if he was lazy, “to increase the frequency of beatings.” At the same time, the mother had to stand at the door and cry (“otherwise a bad rumor would have swept through the whole neighborhood”).
The student, meanwhile, bowed three times to the ground to the teacher, who, for each bow, hit him on the back with a whip (“placed before the mentor by prudent parents”). Apollo of Corinth assures that they did not hurt. Then the mother seated her son at the table, handed him a “patterned bone pointer”, and the teacher, assuming a stern look, unfolded the alphabet and began teaching. The mother was touched, cried again and asked “not to starve her son for a letter.”
After the end of the lesson, the teachers treated him and gave him gifts: a dress, bread, embroidered towels. Then they were escorted to the gate. The next day, the student himself went to the teacher with the alphabet and a pointer. With him was a “sick compassionate mother” and carried a new gift – “a pot of buckwheat porridge, reddened to glory, not sparingly oiled.” In addition to porridge, the teacher was given a chicken, or even a goose.
Start over
The New Year was celebrated in primitive societies, though at different times, but the meaning was the same. Ancient people gave time a cyclical character: it was constantly reborn, and with it the person was updated. The celebration of the New Year ritually repeated the model of the Creation of the world, which was preceded by Chaos. Chaos was inextricably linked with Creation, just as the End was with the Beginning.
“The annual exorcism of demons, sins and diseases, in essence, is an attempt to return at least for a moment the mythical primordial Time, “pure” Time, as it was at the “moment” of Creation,” writes the Romanian philosopher, historian and ethnographer Mircea Eliade. “Any New Year is a renewal of Time from its beginning, that is, a repetition of cosmogony.”
The tradition of celebrating the New Year at the end of March, when nature came to life, came to Slavic culture from the ancient Sumerians who lived in Mesopotamia (the territory of modern Iraq). The Sumerian civilization is considered one of the oldest – historians determine its existence in the III millennium BC. Mesopotamia created the symbolism of the New Year.
In our country, the New Year became the main holiday only during the Soviet era. In the Russian Empire, he was only “a part of the Christmas festivities that lasted until Epiphany”, and besides, “lordly” and alien to the peasants.
Let there be light!
No holiday is accompanied by as many lighting effects as the New Year. Candles, garlands, sparklers, fireworks… The collective unconscious forces us to follow the tradition for the same reason that people lit a fire at the New Year’s Eve thousands of years ago. Each light we lit on New Year’s Eve is a symbol of new life.
This symbolism is everywhere – in the biblical star that marked the birth of Jesus, and in the big fire of the Maslenitsa holiday, with which the Slavs celebrated the New Year, and even in the plot of children’s matinees. The lights on the Christmas tree went out – the old world is dead. To defeat the evil heroes (cosmogonic chaos), the Christmas tree must be lit.
“One two Three! Shine Christmas tree!” – such a simple call helps to stage the creation of a new world at children’s matinees. Let everything that was dark and scary end for you with the New Year’s lights. Happy days to you next year!