Travel to Moscow in late December and early January, and you will step into a winter wonderland of monumental scale: Red Square gleams beneath miles of golden canopy lights, ice skaters twirl in front of the candy-striped domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral, and towering fir trees illuminate every boulevard from the Moscow River to Tverskaya Street. Yet for Western visitors, the Moscow holiday calendar holds a fascinating historical twist: in Russia, the giant decorated trees, the arrival of Grandfather Frost, and the midnight champagne toasts happen on December thirty-first for New Year’s Eve, while Orthodox Christmas itself arrives a full week later on January seventh as a solemn, candlelit religious feast.
Why Russia Celebrates Christmas on January Seventh
The reason Moscow celebrates Christmas thirteen days after December twenty-fifth traces back to a sixteenth-century astronomical calendar reform. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the modern Gregorian Calendar across Catholic Europe to fix a slight mathematical drift in the ancient Roman Julian Calendar established by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. Because the Julian calendar slightly miscalculated the length of the solar year by eleven minutes each year, it gained one extra day every one hundred and twenty-eight years.
While the Soviet government officially switched Russia’s civil everyday calendar to the modern Gregorian system in February 1918, the Russian Orthodox Church kept the ancient Julian Calendar for all religious holidays and liturgical feasts. By the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the accumulated gap between the two calendars had grown to exactly thirteen days—meaning that December twenty-fifth on the ancient Julian church calendar falls on January seventh on our modern civil calendar (and will shift to January eighth in the year 2101).
How New Year’s Absorbed the Christmas Tree (The Yolka)
During the Tsarist era before 1917, Russian noble and merchant families celebrated a traditional Christmas in December with decorated spruce trees, balls, and gifts. After the Bolshevik Revolution, however, militant atheist campaigns in the late 1920s outlawed both the religious holiday of Christmas and the Christmas tree as “bourgeois clerical relics.” Parents who wanted a tree for their children had to smuggle pine branches into their apartments after dark behind heavy curtains.
Then, in December 1935, Soviet official Pavel Postyshev published a famous letter in the newspaper Pravda proposing that children should not be deprived of the joy of a sparkling winter tree. Overnight, all the beloved secular traditions of Christmas were transferred to New Year’s Eve (Novy God) on December thirty-first:
- The New Year’s Yolka: Decorated fir trees (yolki) topped with a five-pointed red star instead of a Bethlehem star returned to every living room and public square, culminating in the massive Kremlin Yolka inside the State Kremlin Palace.
- Ded Moroz and Snegurochka: Instead of arriving on Christmas Eve, Grandfather Frost (Ded Moroz) and his granddaughter, the Snow Maiden (Snegurochka), visit homes and school pageants on New Year’s Eve to deliver presents.
- The Midnight Banquet: On the night of December thirty-first, families gather around tables loaded with Olivier salad (diced potatoes, carrots, peas, pickles, eggs, and meat in mayonnaise), Dressed Herring (layered under grated beets and mayonnaise), red caviar tartlets, and bowls of fragrant mandarins, watching the classic 1975 Soviet romantic comedy film The Irony of Fate before the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Tower chimes midnight.
January Sixth and Seventh: The 12 Lenten Dishes and Cathedral Vigils
Once the exuberant ten-day national winter holiday week of early January is underway, the atmosphere in Moscow shifts toward quiet spiritual reverence for Orthodox Christmas. For devout believers, Christmas is preceded by a forty-day Nativity Fast (abstaining from meat, dairy, and eggs) that reaches its climax on January sixth, Christmas Eve (Sochelnik). Tradition dictates that no food is eaten on January sixth until the very first evening star appears in the dark winter sky—symbolizing the Star of Bethlehem.
When that star shines, families sit down over a white tablecloth (often spread over a wisp of hay in memory of the manger) to share the Holy Supper of Twelve Meatless Dishes, representing the twelve Apostles:
- Sochivo (Kutya): The most important ritual dish (which gives Christmas Eve its Russian name, Sochelnik)—whole wheat berries or rice boiled until tender and mixed with golden honey, poppy seeds, walnuts, and dried raisins, eaten first by every member of the family from a shared bowl.
- Vzvar and Lenten Borsch: A warm compote brewed from dried apples, pears, and prunes, alongside mushroom soup, buckwheat kasha, pickled mushrooms, sauerkraut pies (pirozhki), and baked fish.
Late on the night of January sixth, tens of thousands of worshippers bundle up against sub-zero temperatures and walk through the snow to Moscow’s golden-domed churches—most notably the monumental Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on the bank of the Moskva River—for the all-night Christmas Vigil liturgy, where flickering beeswax candles and unaccompanied multi-part Slavic choral hymns echo until dawn on January seventh, breaking the forty-day fast with a joyous Christmas Day feast of roasted goose with apples, suckling pig, and spiced honey gingerbread (pryaniki).
