Celebrating Sviatki!

Our friends Vlad and Katya, from Kazakhstan, invited us to celebrate Sviatki, the "Holy Supper" on Russian Orthodox Christmas Eve, with them.

On January 7th, thirteen days after Western Christmas, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the birth of Jesus, in accordance with the old Julian calendar. The simplest explanation for the date discrepancy is that the Julian calendar dates back to Roman times and was calculated by the solar and lunar cycles. It was quite inaccurate compared to our calendar system today and over hundreds of years, they gained several days, which is why Christmas turned out to be on January 7, instead of December 25. Many Russians just celebrate along with the rest of us and will then celebrate again on the Orthodox date. Vlad and Katya's kids like it because two celebrations means two sets of presents!

They have a character known as "Ded Moroz", which translates to Grandfather Frost. He is very much like the western "Santa Claus", except he wears a long lavish robe, is accompanied by only one assistant, the Snow Maiden, and delivers presents on New Year's Eve, rather than Christmas Eve.

Traditionally, the "Holy Supper" (served on Christmas Eve - January 6th) consists of 12 different foods, symbolic of the 12 Apostles, but Katya just prepared some of the more popular dishes that she thought we would enjoy. She served roasted goose, meat pie and cold pork as the main dishes. Salads are also really popular and she prepared meat salad, which is similar to potato salad, with chunks of ham and peas in it, pickled beet and carrot salad (beets are popular in Russia) and also a fish salad, which sounds a little strange, but was surprisingly good. It was a mild white fish, chopped and pickled with dressing, served cold. She made two desserts - chocolate and also a honey cake. Everything was delicious and it was fun to try something new. The boys even did some Vodka shots, but the girls stuck to beer and wine. My shot days are long over!

Dayven had spent all his fun tickets the day before when he and the boys went to see Avatar at the 3-D IMAX theatre. He was wiped out and a little under the weather, so he stayed home with the kids.