these Ukrainians celebrated their first Christmas on December 25

Since last July, Ukraine has adopted the Gregorian calendar, thus distancing itself a little further from Russia. For the first time this year, the country officially celebrates Christmas on December 25.

Ukraine celebrates Christmas for the first time on December 25, and not on January 7 as was the case until now, and as is the case in Russia. A way for kyiv to break a little further with Moscow.

In the darkness of Saint-Michel Church in kyiv, Zoya crosses herself and takes a candle. All her life, she celebrated Christmas on January 7. But at almost 70 years old, it’s a bygone era: “From now on, we will only celebrate it on the 25th. Everything linked to Russia no longer exists. For my family and me, in fact, Russia is dead. I don’t consider them as humans because “Humans can’t behave like this… Killing us for nothing. Even now, we still don’t understand why they’re killing us.”

“The Moscow Patriarchate has appropriated the Ukrainian Church”

It is through a law adopted last summer that Christmas is now officially celebrated on December 25, abandoning the Julian calendar of Russian Orthodoxy to adopt the Gregorian calendar, like the Europeans. It was in 2019 that the schism took place in the wake of the Donbass war and the annexation of Crimea. In Kherson, in the south of the country, Father Nicodemus was one of the first religious of the Ukrainian Church to leave the bosom of the Moscow Patriarchate: “Ukraine has long been occupied by Russia. It is not only a territorial occupation, but also a cultural and spiritual one. In the past, the Moscow Patriarchate appropriated the Ukrainian church and tried to uproot the peculiarities of this church.”

During the nine months of Russian occupation in Kherson, Father Nicodemus never left. The liturgy in Ukrainian, the homilies exalting independence, the nation. For him, the decision to change the date of Christmas is just a return to pre-Soviet tradition: “Our church has switched to the new calendar. In fact, it is not new, but rather normal, since we celebrate Christmas on December 25, as it should always have been. They repeat that we are brother peoples. But We are totally different peoples. And the war we are experiencing at the moment is an ideological war.” For Father Nicodemus, it is now a question of accomplishing the “unoccupancy” spirituality of the country. Many Ukrainians still struggle to abandon tradition.