Christmas 2023
The first Christmas on the December date. A calendar moved after four centuries, and households worked out for themselves what to do with the change.
A blessed Christmas.
This was the first on the new date. Ukraine moved to the revised Julian calendar, and Christmas moved from the seventh of January to the twenty-fifth of December.
What interested me was how households handled it, because a state can move a date on paper and cannot move a grandmother. Some families kept both — the December date for the church and the January one for the table, or the other way round. Some moved entirely. Some spent a year negotiating with relatives and settled it the following Christmas.
That is exactly how these things have always worked. A calendar reform is decided by an institution and then implemented, slowly and inconsistently, in several million kitchens.
Whichever date your household keeps, or both: a peaceful Christmas to you.
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