Correggio
THE HOLY NIGHT
The Date of Russia’s Christmastide
Real winter in Russia is supposed to start on the feast of St. Nicholas of which the date, written in Russian style, is December 6/19. The first figure gives the date of the month as it is known in Russia and Greece, the second the date according to the calendar in use in all other civilized countries.
The calendar which was brought into use by Julius Cæsar, and was carried all over the then known world by the Romans, aimed to measure the year by the time it takes the earth to move once around the sun. His Egyptian astronomer figured that this required 365¼ days, so the practice was begun of having three years of 365 days, followed by a leap year, to which an extra day is given. As a matter of fact, the length of the average year is not exactly 365¼ days. To be sure, that is only 11¼ seconds or so out of the way, and this may seem a very small matter out of a whole year; but what happens is that every 128 years or so the calendar of Julius Cæsar or the Julian Calendar, as it is called, gets a day behind. By the year 1582, when Gregory XIII was Pope, the calendar was ten days slow. So Pope Gregory issued an order that the year was to take a new start and that thereafter three leap years out of every four centuries should be omitted, which keeps the calendar very nearly correct. But though Pope Gregory might decree, it did not follow that every one would obey at once; the ignorant thought that by the change of date they were losing ten days of time and, of course, of wages. After some confusion all the Roman Catholic countries obeyed. England, being a Protestant country, ignored Pope Gregory’s commands. But it could not so easily dismiss the knowledge of its own astronomers that the Gregorian Calendar, as it is called, is nearer the truth than the Julian. In 1752, therefore, the date of the day of the year was changed by an Act of Parliament. The day after September 3 was to be called September 14, which it would have been if the calendar had not been slow. And naturally the change was also made in America, to which the new style had been brought already by French and Spanish settlers from Catholic countries.
There were always hot jealousies between the Eastern Church, ruled from Constantinople, and the Western, ruled from Rome. The Eastern or Greek churches refused to change their calendar on the order of a Latin Pope, and to this day retain the old style, the Julian dates. This is why their Christmas follows our Twelfth Day, for by this time their calendar is thirteen days behind the Gregorian. But to avoid confusion the double date is very generally in use.
During the time between the Day of St. Nicholas and Christmas it seems as if half Russia streams out upon the ice of the river Neva in St. Petersburg. All through the summer the boats come and go, bringing food, fuel, building materials, everything the city needs, from the interior; but the river is frozen for six months of the year, and in those months it is used as if it were public land. St. Petersburg is a very gay capital in winter, when the wealthier Russian nobles have left their country estates, and come down to exchange visits, to give balls, or go dashing about in gay sleighs to join the sleighing or skating contests for which a part of the frozen river is reserved. All around the cleared spaces on the ice, merchants have set up temporary booths; here you may buy tea and nutcakes; there holy pictures, or ikons, pictures of all the possible saints, some costing a few pennies, others with gold and silver backgrounds costing many roubles, a rouble being worth about fifty cents. On another part of the river a great provision market is held a little before Christmas, and the booths stretch for miles. Everything is frozen. Countless oxen, piles of sheep and goats, pyramids of pigs, form a frozen range of hillocks to which the butcher comes to make his choice. With hatchet or saw he divides the animal, ox, or pig, or it may be a bear, into sections which his customers store in the ice-cellars which have all been freshly filled. Thousands of workmen are engaged during the winter in cutting and drawing the ice from yet another part of the Neva, and on a still frosty morning the clink of their axes against iron ice-breakers can be heard at a long distance from the river.
A great ceremony of the Greek Church takes place each year at the end of their Christmas season—the Benediction of the Waters—in every town and village in Russia and down along the coasts of Greece. In St. Petersburg the ceremony is performed by the Czar outside the Winter Palace. A wooden temple is put up out on the ice, decorated with gilt and paintings within, and surrounded by a hedge of fir boughs without. A hole is made in the ice, and to this a long procession makes its way; troops with bright banners, gorgeously robed bishops, and priests carrying lighted tapers and big ikons, are followed by more soldiers, the Czar and Czarina in magnificently jewelled robes, and after them their Court brilliant in uniforms and beautiful fur-trimmed dresses. They have all attended one service in the Imperial Chapel; they now have another on the ice. The water is blessed, evil spirits flee away, the soldiers fire a salute, and every one is sprinkled with the now holy water. The procession returns to the city, carrying with it great vessels of the holy water to be used later in all the churches. Then the people who have been looking on try to get to the hole; some draw up pailfuls of the cold liquid; others plunge bodily into the icy water, believing that so they will be cleansed from sin or sickness; many have even plunged delicate babies into it, content, if the child does not survive the shock, in the belief that its soul is forever saved. And over every door in the great city on that day rests the sign of the cross, lest the evil spirit expelled from the water should enter any home.
