Bringing in the New Year

The December air is crisp and a white frost covers the land, the trees, and even our horses’ thick coats. The tree branches are brittle and snap at the slightest touch. Tiny ice crystals cling to blades of grass. The crystals are so delicate and intricate that they mimic the leaves of the plant. The landscape looks heavenly in its whiteness, yet fragile and cold. For a few days, the nearby Nerussa River turns into a giant slurpee – crushed ice floats on the surface until finally brought to a standstill by a deep freeze.

The sun hovers above the horizon for a scant seven hours each day, as the nights grow longer. During the extended evening hours, Igor and I sit by the fire and read or watch whatever is being broadcast on ORT, the one national television station that reaches our lonely expanse of forest. Like the sun, we go to bed early and wake up late, catching up on sleep lost in the brevity of summer’s nights.

With Christmas and New Year’s nearing, I walk to the other end of the village to find out why our postlady or her husband Stepan haven’t brought the mail by for nearly a week. Surely I must have some Christmas cards or packages waiting. I knock on the door in the high fence surrounding their yard. Stepan opens it and invites me into the house. I sit on the broad bench in the hallway. Stepan hands me two scanty issues of the district newspaper, which comes out twice a week, but no letters. I realize my Christmas cards won’t arrive for months. Then he pulls a little tin from his coat pocket and puts a pinch of something in his palm.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Makhorka,” he says. Homegrown tobacco.

“You grow it yourself?” I ask, surprised.

“Kuda denus?” he replies. What choice do I have?

He takes an old, yellowed newspaper from the shelf and tears off a two-inch square piece. He puts a little of the tobacco in the middle of the paper and rolls it up, licking the edge to make it stick.

“You’re going to smoke that?” I ask.

“Yes. Why?”

“Newspaper has lead in it! I say, That’s bad for you.”

“No one dies healthy anyway,” he retorts.

“Let me try one,” I say.

So he gives me a scoop of tobacco and a section of newspaper. He offers to roll it up for me, but since I don’t want to smoke his spit, I carefully roll it up and seal it with my own. He lights a match, and I inhale. I cough immediately and stub the thing out.

“How can you smoke that?” I cry.

“That’s what all the men here smoke,” he says. After makhorka, all other cigarettes seem weak.

His stained yellow teeth and fingers attest to a lifelong devotion to makhorka. I hear a loud squeal from the next room. I look through the doorway and see nothing but two narrow beds and the stove.

“It’s the swine,” he says. “We keep him in the box by the stove in the winter.”

I step inside the room to take a look. There is a tall, narrow wooden box painted blue standing next to the stove. It has a diamond-shaped peephole in a small door at one end. I look inside and barely make out the dark form of a large pig. The smell, however, leaves no doubt in my mind.

“Do all the villagers keep their pigs inside in winter?” I ask.

“Of course,” he says, “or else they’d freeze, and we wouldn’t have any salo [lard].” After a pause he adds, “Then we’d freeze!”

On New Year’s Eve, all the villagers decorate spruce trees and open presents brought by Ded Moroz (Father Frost) and his assistant, his granddaughter Snegurochka (Snow Maiden). Because Christmas was banned under Communism as a religious holiday, New Year’s took its place in Soviet times as the country’s most important annual celebration.

We invite Igor’s family to join us on New Year’s Eve. We sit down to eat at about 11 pm. The table is decked with spruce boughs, pine cones, candles, and 12 different dishes of food, one for each month of the year. Pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, marinated cabbage with cranberries, sliced ham and cheese, salads, mashed potatoes, pork chops, baked mushrooms with smetana (sour cream), and olivye – no holiday feast would be complete without this traditional Russian potato salad.

We pile the food onto our plates. First we say farewell to the passing year, leaving all that was undesirable behind us. The men drink vodka and the women drink wine. We raise our glasses as each person pronounces a toast (we are not supposed to put our glasses down until the toast is finished and everyone drinks). As midnight draws near, Igor opens two bottles of champagne and refills the glasses. ORT is broadcasting a traditional holiday concert and, as the countdown begins, the screen shows the clock on the bell tower in the Kremlin wall. When the clock strikes twelve, we clink glasses and rejoice, dancing around the room and hugging each other. Now we can welcome in the New Year, so another round of toasts begin. We put on music and dance, shaking the floorboards and windows of our small house. By 2 am we are exhausted.

The next day, the festivities continue. Leftovers are taken from the fridge and new dishes hastily put together to feed guests who pour in throughout the day. The absence of a road doesn’t deter the visitors, who make a special effort to hike in with food and gifts for the holiday. As evening nears, I take a pack of cigarettes down the way to Stepan as a New Year’s present.

“If you are going to smoke in the New Year,” I say, “these are better than makhorka.” He thanks me, opens the pack, and then tears the filter off one of the cigarettes and lights it with a match.

“Happy New Year,” he says.

“Yeah, you too, I reply.”