This week on Gladio Free Europe, we watched the 1997 film Sympathy Seeker, similar in some ways to Mamma Mia. The film takes place on New Year's Eve as a woman who had never met her father tries to connect with men who believe themselves to be him. It can be a bit saccharine at times, but overall it's a very funny and sweet movie.

More importantly, we used the opportunity to discuss the history of New Year's as a holiday in the Former Soviet Union. As a result of the communists' anti-religious drive in the first few decades of Soviet rule, religious holidays were largely stamped out of public life. This culminated with the 1929 decision to turn Christmas into a working day, a deeply unpopular decision which began to be turned back from 1935. But rather than reintroducing a holiday central to the church and Christian practice, Christmas traditions became grafted onto the New Year. Hence, Christmas trees turned into New Year's trees, and a distinctly Soviet way of celebrating the holiday developed. Instead of Saint Nicholas delivering presents to children, the task was left to Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) and his granddaughter Snegurochka. In this episode we delve into the history of Christmas/New Year's practices in Russia and the Former Soviet Union, as well as contemporary culture wars surrounding the holiday, which many nationalists in countries such as Ukraine consider to be a symbol of the Soviet past. Additionally, we talk about the friction surrounding New Year's trees faced by recent Jewish emigrants from the Former Soviet Union as a result of many other Jews considering the trees too similar to Christmas trees.

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