Five generations around the Christmas tree

Christmas traditions and legends are handed down in the family from mother to daughter, from grandmother to granddaughter. The eldest family member, 87-year-old World War II veteran Olha Yakivna, remembers that villagers used to come to the house of her father, a middle-income peasant Yakiv Shevchenko, well before the mass-scale collectivization to pound wheat for cooking kutia (sweet grain pudding). There was a wooden mortar and a pedal-operated pestle in their household – the only one in the area. They always celebrated Christmas. They did so even in 1933, the year of famine, without kutia or kalachi (dough rolls), just with a piece of a frozen beetroot found in the field – and with a sincere prayer. They also did this in the wartime 1942, also without ritual food, hiding from roundups and from being carried away to Germany. In the early 1950s, when daughter Liuba was born, they began adorning a tiny Christmas tree in a small house they had built by themselves. Liubov Hryhorivna still keeps one of those first toys – a little pink ball with a red flower. Every year she hangs it, as if it was something very valuable, to the very top of the now artificial Christmas tree.

This family sings all kinds of carols in the wintertime festive days. They know dozens of them. Viktoria Viktorivna collects folk tunes from various regions of Ukraine for her amateur art units – the Vizerunky ensemble and the theater Rovesnyk. She once initiated holding a Christmastime festival, Nova Radist (“New Joy”), in the raion, which is now an annual regional event. Blessed by archpriest Oleksandr (Myronov), the dean of Haivoron raion’s churches, this idea’s author remains the chief coordinator, scriptwriter, stage director, and MC of this wonderful extravaganza, in which most of her family members take part.

Five generations celebrate New Year and Christmas in this wide family circle – the five-year-old Sofia VOLOSHCHUK’s great-great-grandmother Olha KOROL, great-grandmother Liubov PANCHENKO, grandmother Viktoria VAKULENKO, mother Oleksandra VOLOSHCHUK, and aunts Darynka and Kateryna. They are sure to offer a prayer to the Lord for peace in Ukraine and sing carols to the glory of Jesus Christ.