DOUBLE EXPOSURE: Holiday greetings, Round 1 (03/27/05)

DOUBLE EXPOSURE

by Khristina Lew

Holiday greetings, Round 1

Today, many Americans of Ukrainian descent are celebrating Easter, and I greet those of you who do with the Resurrection of Our Lord. To the rest of you I say: four more weeks to go.

Most of us grew up in households where Christmas and Easter were celebrated twice - Christmas on December 25 according to the Gregorian calendar and January 7 according to the Julian, Easter on two separate dates and once every five years on the same date. My family was one of the holdouts: we celebrated the holidays only according to the Julian, or old calendar; December 25 and the Easter Sunday that didn't coincide with the Julian calendar were like any other day for us.

That kind of orthodoxy caused great problems for Ukrainian communities in the U.S. when parishes converted from one calendar to the other. I grew up in Washington, and, although I was very young when our parish, Holy Trinity, branched off to become a patriarchal church, I remember the tensions it caused in D.C.'s small Ukrainian Catholic community.

I have a friend who grew up in Chicago and remembers when her parish, St. Nicholas, converted from the old to the new calendar. "The priests didn't ask the parishioners whether they wanted to Americanize and have mass in English. A lot of these people, like my grandparents, didn't speak English," she said. (She asked not to be identified because the issue is still a sore point in her family.) So the parishioners literally rioted, attacked a priest and ended up building a new church, Ss. Volodymyr and Olha, two blocks down the street.

The situation in Chicago was extreme. The way Andrea Kochanowsky of Glen Rock, N.J., grew up is typical of most Ukrainian American families: her mother celebrated by the new calendar, her father by the old, so the family celebrated both. "My friends growing up were jealous because I had two Christmases," she says. Now her husband, Roman, and their son, Zenko, celebrate old calendar holidays with her parents and new calendar holidays with Roman's parents. "Splitting up holidays between the families is never an issue," she says.

Stefka Nazarkewycz of Manhattan is undecided about whether to celebrate by the new calendar or the old, so she does a little of both. "This year we'll be going to my husband's family in Ohio for American Easter, and Ukrainian Easter we'll have with my father," she says.

Andrea Odezynska-Ihnat of Brooklyn, N.Y., celebrates by the new calendar because her hometown parish in Philadelphia celebrated by that calendar. She says that there have been times when it was more convenient to celebrate Christmas on the 25th with one set of grandparents and Christmas on the 7th with another. "With all due respect, I think it's great to have two. Life here is complicated - people are bound by school schedules, work schedules. I'm not one of those people who thinks it should be either or," she says.

But Stefka and my friend from Chicago are. "Everyone should follow one calendar because it gets confusing for the kids. If most people agreed to go to the new, I'd go along, but not if it happens like it did in Chicago in the 1960s," the Chicagoan says. Stefka says it's too complicated to have two Christmases and that she'd prefer to have one, "probably new, because I'm married to someone who is not Ukrainian," she says.

Andrea Kochanowsky says she likes to keep old traditions and even if her family stopped celebrating by the old calendar, she would do something for January 7. "If I had to choose," she said, "I would pick the old."

Back in the days when we had to defend the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians, I used to think that we in the U.S. should celebrate Christmas and Easter by the same calendar, on the same date - strength in numbers and what not.

At the time that logic may have held true, but today uniformity no longer appears to be the glue that holds people together. Look at the Lebanese: Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Christians and Druse, all united in their efforts to get rid of Syria. Or Ukraine's Orange Revolution: easterners, westerners, students, pensioners, Russian speakers, Ukrainian speakers, Orthodox and non-believers. Who's going to say they're not all Ukrainians?

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