My name is Carolyn, I was a English education PCV from 2010-2013 in the Republic of Moldova.
When you are living abroad holidays take on new meaning. Maybe you let them slide by without celebration or turn them into something big with as many other PCVs as you can find. Or (if you're lucky) you get on board with local celebrations and traditions. In Moldova you get a chance at all three.
Most Moldovans belong to the Russian Orthodox church, which continues to follow the Julian calendar for religious holidays. The country of as a whole uses the "newer" Georgian calendar for the year, which is the one most people are familiar with. So while the Georgian calendar puts Christmas as December 25th, the Julian calendar is saying "wait, wait, wait--Christmas is still 13 days away."
For PCVs this means 2 Christmas celebrations and 2 New Year's celebrations, a good mix of familiar traditions and newer Moldovan ones. My friends and I would get together and watch sappy Christmas movies, eat too much food and exchange gifts. We made a new little family and did some kitschy holiday crafts. Then we would go back to our host families and prepare for another round of holiday traditions and too much food.
One of my favorite memories is of making Christmas cards for my friends, host family and co-workers. For me, homemade Christmas cards are my traditional "getting ready for Christmas" activity. My first year I decided to write some of the cards in Russian for my Russian speaking cohorts and I asked my host-mom for help. The first thing we established was that Americans said "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" while Moldovans have a universal "Happy New Year" because, guess what, that is the big holiday for them.
New year's day, January 1st, became the winter holiday under the Soviets. It is the changing of the year, it isn't religious, and it was something that could be instituted around the USSR. So people look forward to giving and receiving gifts on January 1st, while the Orthodox calendar took care of the religious holidays later in January.
Christmas for Moldovans is a very religious day. I know that for many Americans it is just as religious but somehow in Moldova it seemed that the religious aspects of it were...clearer. And the traditions of course, are very different. Groups of children (usually boys) go door to door singing traditional songs (more like chants) while wearing masks. You give them money and ceremonial bread (Kalatch) in return.
Old New Year (or Orthodox New Year) takes place on January 13th and follows a pretty similar pattern but you get the added bonus being blessed with a mixture of seeds throw at you for good luck. One of the really fun things about Old New Year is that you are usually back in school, so the whole week is filled with seed throwing. You don't clean the seeds up either, that would be bad luck. So you walk around going "crunch" for a couple of days.
I enjoyed my two sets of holidays. I had time with friends, time to travel, and time to be with my host family. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year....and С Рождеством , с новым годом!
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