Christmas,

or, Concerts Galore

Christmas itself involved going out in the morning and, discovering the hordes of people carrying trees back to their homes, impulsively buying one myself. It was the first day they had really been up for sale around town. I took a trip to a chain grocery store to buy lights and ornaments. I stood the tree in my emptied trash bucket and wrapped a red plaid skirt around the base. A real tree skirt! The afternoon involved making my very first very own Christmas tree pretty. Once I had set up the Christmas tree, however, I couldn’t very well tear into the presents and destroy the display. I willed myself to leave everything alone so birthday party 2, with the Americans, would look festive. See picture below. Amy’s gift arrived soon after the Christmas tree arrived, so I had a picture of an American Christmas tree to overlook my little corner. A picture of a Christmas tree over a Christmas tree in Ukraine erected to refer to Christmas traditions in America. Is there such a thing as meta-Christmas? I think I had one of those this year. Presents were opened over the course of the next few days, rewards for getting this or that completed.



Christmas evening my host-mother invited me to Katya’s New Year’s celebration. I arrived before the concert to find the apartment in disarray, fabric all over the rooms. Alla and Katya were creating her New Year’s costume. This year, she went as a bad mushroom. Picture!



The concert actually consisted of three parts: a large concert in the auditorium, a competition of sorts between classes, and a New Year’s skit performed in a secondary hall by the 7th form, which was the precursor to a dance. The large concert was a poorly prepared affair, when compared to the usual Ukrainian school concert. My host-mother was outraged. It was made up of the general mix of songs and pop-culture parodies (a skit about the Addams family practically ruining, but then saving, New Year, for example), though dance acts were noticeably sparse. My favorite skit was a silent takeoff of a popular cartoon featuring a skillet-toting house-wife, her bumbling husband, who occasionally gets one to the head with the aforementioned cooking implement, and a bear (it was awesome). Side note: My school just had a “safety” concert, where different classes put together skits to teach lessons about fire safety and first aid. The skits were really good. I admire that most students here are unafraid to perform and given a comparatively large number of opportunities to be creative and write and perform their own stories. My American self sighs, though, thinking, “If only that energy was more often channeled into their studies and they were encouraged to create innovative answers and think beyond what the textbook says.”

Ukrainian concerts feature the familiar. The acts most often reproduce, refer to, or (perhaps) reconfigure cultural standards that everyone in the audience recognizes and enjoys. Popular cartoons. The Addams Family. Folk songs are performed at annual concerts year-in, year-out. Students have repertoires, two or three pop songs and/or dances they can pull out at a moment’s notice. Even when more than a moment’s notice is given, the finished product of a dance act, for example, will feature old dance steps reconfigured to fit a new theme. The new and unexpected rarely make an appearance. Concerts are a chance for a particular community – school, town, camp – to connect, and the well-known reaffirms common identity and comforts, allowing the entire audience to participate. Everyone knows what’s going on. Everyone can sing along. It is easy to appreciate and interpret whatever variations on the usual theme occur. American PCVs tend to find this repetition dull; we are trained to expect a greater degree of variety in performance. Innovation.

I think it follows that, where Americans value and, indeed, expect virtuosity, Ukrainians expect preparation (thus my host-mother’s outrage at the students’ many missteps). Where the new is valued, the wish is that a performance will, to some degree, amaze and/or delight with either a unique talent or a unique perspective on a familiar work. I know few Americans willing to display their talents in public and even fewer prepared to do so at short notice. Because getting up in front of an audience in America is essentially saying that you have something special to give – you are accomplished. Even schools (talent shows, anyone?) can seem mini professional realms instead of forums for student self-expression. In contrast, Ukrainian singers (let’s use singers for the present) are not better singers than the rest of the audience. They’re not. They have simply prepared a song – for the joy of singing it. A song that people might like to hear. And if they like it, people in Ukraine will sing along. No one would sing along at a talent show in the States. Not to the point of drowning out the singer, at any rate. Performance in America is about appreciating – and, yes, enjoying – the skills of the performer. You can’t appreciate what you can’t hear. In Ukraine, rousing participation is a mark of success. The performer has chosen well, and performed it well enough to inspire people to sing. The two countries seem to me to have different goals, different expectations. Enjoyment is found in different things – familiarity vs. accomplishment, community vs. individuality. Personally, I do not find Ukrainian concerts more interesting or more impressive than their American counterparts, but they are certainly more supportive. I love to listen to a great singer, I do. Most of the time, I would rather be at an American performance. That being said, I also love to watch a shy little girl find the confidence to belt out a pop song, not altogether well, while her friends cheer her on and the rest of the audience sings along. There is good to be gotten from mediocrity.

After the big concert, my host-mother and I sat to watch Katya perform as a bad mushroom in the New Year’s pageant. I have seen a number of New Year’s pageants/concerts over the past two years, and the general conceit is that there is some storyline that functions to frame the various performances and competitions. This story, as far as my poor Ukrainian leads me to believe, usually involves some evil-doer attempting to steal Christmas, and then Did Moroz (Grandfather Frost – aka Santa Claus) and his niece – leave it to Ukraine to pair Santa with a young girl – arrive to foil the plot and light the New Year (Christmas) tree, signaling the arrival of the holiday. Like the concert I described above, the framing story is often drawn from pop culture. The Addams family sketch falls neatly into this tradition – threat to New Year, attempt to save it. My school saw a “The Little Mermaid” themed pageant, where Ariel, Sebastian and King Trident tried to save New Year from Ursula. My host-sister’s pageant was about the bad mushroom and her compatriot who decided to steal the New Year’s presents… I think because they thought Did Moroz had forgotten about them. But, again, my Ukrainian is shaky. Despite my limited understanding, it was interesting to see, and fun to watch my host-sister and, later, my students play. I am afraid I sometimes lose track of what their lives outside of my classroom include.

New Year was laid back, an hour or so with my host-family, and then the rest of the evening with my counterpart and her family, watching Ukrainian New Year’s concerts on TV and eating salad. I have not had many of the overwhelming, ‘Eat more! Drink more!’ parties that most Americans experience. Once in the village, host-Tato’s birthday ended in lots of champagne and cake and a splitting samahon headache, but, otherwise, my Ukraine experience has been rather low-key. Labeling watching Ukrainian New Year’s TV concerts as “low-key” may be a misnomer, however. They are grand spectacles, involving very scantily-clad pop stars, energetic dance numbers, lots of champagne flutes held aloft, and glitter galore. To give you a taste of the pop music/entertainment culture, an opera singer – complete with theater-appropriate emotion (think: the audience is VERY far away), hair tossing, and expansive hand gestures – made the opera-pop transition with no problem. Add some backup dancers, and you’ve got a star! The entire industry is gaudy and spectacular. Go big or go home.

Fascinating as it all was, I turned into a pumpkin at about 2 AM, wanting very much to go home. A nice neighbor of my counterpart came in to visit her just as we were about to leave and tried to talk a bit to me, but it was futile; the language switch in my brain is most definitely thrown to “English” between the hours of 12 and 7. I feel as though I have a little secretary in the lexical storage department up there: “I’m sorry, but we stopped processing those requests two hours ago. Please try again in the morning, when we will be open and ready to assist you.” After the hours of continuous Ukrainian input from the TV and the failed conversation, I was reduced to staring at the wall clock, fervently hoping that the very nice man would go home so I could go home.

I went home. I slept. And that was my holiday season. Orthodox Christmas and Old New Year were celebrated, but I was not invited to do anything in particular. So I studied for the GREs (I got my official scores the other day. I don’t want to talk about it.) and prepared for classes. A quiet, albeit stressful, coda to a very noisy month.

There is more on its way. Maybe even this weekend. I'm not making any promises. It is the first weekend I've had free since school started, however, and I have grand plans. ...Most of which involve me holed up in my apartment at my computer. Is it bad that the previous sentence does not depress, but excites me? Am I hopeless? Being a hermit is ok as long as I get some work done, right? Right?