Iryna Paranka came to America three months ago after fleeing the war in Ukraine. Two weeks ago, she visited downtown Spokane for the first time. The sight of the Christmas lights and decorations, already up in some parts of the city core, struck her with that kind of nostalgia that can hurt.
"I started to miss Lviv," she says of the largest city in western Ukraine.
She lets out a sigh, the kind with melancholy tinged with longing. She remembers the way that her city, a major commercial shopping center in Ukraine, was all lit up for the holidays.
As in the U.S., holidays in Ukraine vary greatly depending on your religious tradition. So while New Year's can be a huge holiday for some in Ukraine, that's not the case for one Orthodox Christian couple at a Quality Inn in Spokane, which Thrive International has converted into temporary housing for Ukrainian refugees.
"We don't celebrate New Year's at all," says Nickolai Chertov, the father in the family. "We are sleeping."
Ah, but Christmas? Christmas is different. It's not on Dec. 25. They follow the Orthodox Julian calendar and celebrate the day on Jan. 7.
It's weeks after many Americans celebrate the yule, and it's not all pure joyous revelry. For 40 full days before Christmas, they fast — giving up eating meat, milk and eggs. Think of it as a little like Lent, when you're supposed to focus on being kind and humane, all while setting aside some of your earthly passions. For adults, that might mean giving up TV.
For Chertov's kids, he says, that typically means no computer games.
But then comes Christmas, which not only includes feasts — imagine a 12-course meal, one dish for each of the 12 apostles. It also includes a big Christmas tree and presents — last year they got a trampoline, one they had to leave at a neighbor's house near Kharkiv when they fled the country after the Russian invasion. And it includes a door-to-door ritual that combines Christmas caroling with some Christmas-ified trick-or-treating. Kids are handed candy or money.
For some children, the songs are simple chants, boiling down to little more than "give me candy."
The Chertovs, however, are proud that their songs offer a little more. Chertov begins thump-thumping his hands on the table, providing an improvised percussion and his family — minus his embarrassed daughter who slides under the table — begins singing a traditional Ukrainian carol.
Already, the staff at Thrive are brainstorming how to bring Ukrainian traditions alive for folks like Chertov and Paranka. Marshall McClean, a local musician who works with communications for Thrive, is already thumbing away on his phone as we talk, ordering Chertov an actual drum.
There's discussion around the table. Maybe the Ukrainians go door to door at the motel, perhaps, singing the carols from home. Maybe they could, if for a moment, capture that spirit of Christmas, so far away from where they wish they could be celebrating it. ♦
