The didukh: a sheaf in the corner of the room

Among all the things brought into a Ukrainian house on Christmas Eve, the didukh is the one that most obviously does not belong to Christmas.

What it is

A sheaf of grain — traditionally the last one cut at harvest, kept aside for months — brought in on Christmas Eve and stood in the corner of honour, where the icons hang and where the head of the household sits.

It stays for the holiday period, and is traditionally burned or scattered afterwards rather than thrown away.

What it represents

The word means, roughly, grandfather-spirit, and the sheaf is understood as the ancestors present in the house for the holiday. This is why the empty place at the table makes sense: the household is understood to include the dead for that evening, and the sheaf is where they are.

The harvest connection is inseparable from this. The last sheaf carries the year's continuity into the next year, and the ancestors and the grain are the same idea approached from two directions.

Its age

Nothing about the didukh is Christian in origin, and nobody has ever seriously argued otherwise. It is agrarian and ancestral, it survived the arrival of Christianity by being harmless, and it survived the Soviet period in villages by being small enough to ignore.

Its return

The didukh has become markedly more common again in cities in recent years, sold in markets to people who do not farm and who are placing it in an apartment corner rather than beside a stove.

An urban household with no connection to a harvest still puts a sheaf in the corner. Whatever the object is doing, it is not agricultural any more, and it is clearly still doing it.

A sheaf of wheat standing in the corner of honour gathers what this country lives on into a single object. Interpreting it is not mine to do. The one thing I noticed is that its return happened by nobody's decision — people simply started doing it again. That is how a custom revives, not by being announced.