Happy 2023

We rang in the New Year with our Ukraine family. Christmas and New Year are very different there, and it took some explaining and reading to finally understand it all. I'll give you the script note version:

• New Year's Eve is a massive holiday celebration. It starts at home with tons of food, a Christmas tree, and a visit from Santa. Then it spills into the street, where there are parties and fireworks.
• At midnight, everyone goes home and opens presents.
• Christmas is celebrated on January 7th in accordance with the Eastern Orthodox religious calendar.

There is more history involved, and some Ukrainians celebrate Christmas by the Julian calendar, but we did it the way Oleg's family does it. They invited us for New Year's Eve and we partied way into the next day.

The first thing we did was eat. There was SO much food! We ate appetizers and drank cocktails and champagne. Then, we had a large feast and wine. Following all of that, we jumped into playing games. Oleg had arranged all these tik tok games, and we laughed so hard playing them. 

At one point during our gaming, there came a loud banging on the front door. It scared the crap out of all of us, but it was only Santa Claus. He came inside, offering good wishes, and then he insisted we all give him a poem for goodies from his sack. Having paid attention to Oleg's many details on how he celebrated the holiday, I jumped in first, reciting a poem called Nancy Hanks by Rosemary Benet. It was a poem I had to learn for some class in elementary school, and I've never forgotten the first stanza.

I was rewarded with a handful of candies. Santa had to really work hard to get the others involved, and some of the poems were inappropriate--thankfully, there were no small children with big ears to hear them.

We turned on the television for the ball drop and got our champagne ready in the nick of time. There was a lot of celebrating--loudly. Then we took photos.

Did I mention liquor was prevalent? 

Everyone went outside for fireworks and sparklers. I stayed inside. I'm not a fire person, nor did I want to be around if the association folks came outside to cite us for too much excitement. They ended up leaving the subdivision and setting them off in the street, but those things were LOUD. Plus, they weren't the only ones shooting them off.

When everyone returned, we opened presents. In their tradition, everyone just rips into the gifts, which made for a lot of chaos. I'm used to unwrapping taking hours. They did slow it down after I whined, so we could enjoy seeing what everyone got.

We left for home after 2:00 a.m. It was a blast, but we were all pretty dead todayy. Still, I could get used to this tradition!