Koliada and the winter singing

There are two words for what gets sung in Ukrainian houses in early January, and the distinction is the whole story.

Koliadky and shchedrivky

Koliadky are sung at Christmas and shchedrivky around the new year, and both are performed by groups who go from house to house, sing at the threshold and are given food or money.

A great many of them are Christian in content: the nativity, the star, the shepherds. A great many others are not, and this is where it becomes interesting. The older layer addresses the household directly and describes it as prosperous — the master of the house is compared to the moon, the mistress to the sun, the children to stars; the yard is full, the harvest was good, the cattle are healthy.

What that kind of song is doing

It is not describing. It is asserting, on the assumption that saying a thing in the right form at the right moment helps to bring it about. That is a magical function rather than a devotional one, and it survives untouched inside a Christian holiday.

The most famous example internationally is the one the world knows as the Carol of the Bells. It is a shchedrivka about a swallow arriving to tell the master of the house that his flocks and his fortune will be good. There is nothing in the original about Christmas.

The goat

In fuller versions of the performance a member of the group wears a goat costume, is ritually killed and revived at the threshold. Nobody has ever offered me an explanation for that which is compatible with a nativity play.

I do not have the ear to tell the two kinds of song apart. I will say only this: that the group at the door expects something back from the household, and that it works like an exchange, reminded me less of a ceremony than of a contract — a small, reciprocal one whose terms everybody knows.