Merry Christmas from Bethlehem
I’ll start with a confession.
I don’t celebrate Christmas. Not really.
Hashtag awkward.
I’m sure pretended to for years, in an effort to assimilate, to be like everyone else. But if I’m honest with myself, I don’t actually care all that much.
I grew up in the Soviet Union, were any talk of religion (“the opiate of the masses”) was generally frowned upon. Less so in the 1980s when I grew up, but it was thoroughly rooted out half a century earlier and my grandparents didn’t even know how to practice it anymore - and so it wasn’t passed onto me.
So it’s the New Year celebrations that has always been the big one, with family squeezed around a big table, a huge pot of Russian salad, an equally huge tray of herring-under-coat, home-made meat aspic (we’d be still eating all those days later for breakfast, lunch and dinner), red caviar (if you’re lucky to get a tiny tin) sparingly applied to some fresh white bread, obligatory clement…
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