Celebration

There are many holidays in the Ukraine that have many traditions. My favourite holiday growing up was New Year's Day. I didn’t grow up in a family where we followed traditions for New Year and Christmas. However, we did have our traditions that made these holidays more magical. It all began on December 30th, when we started to prepare special food for New Year’s. This included mandarins, salad “olivie”, and the traditional “holodnoe”. Of course, it would not be a New Year celebration without champagne. The whole family participated in the preparations. We began to eat dinner at 9:00 pm and then would wait until midnight, when the clock ticked twelve times, we drank champagne and made a wish for the New Year. After this, all the children were allowed to open Christmas presents, this was the best part of the Christmas holidays. We spent the night dancing, singing and enjoying each other’s company. On January 1st, we rested a little bit and then we ate all the leftovers for dinner. Although we were all tired, we were happy that we spent the holiday together with all my relatives and made special memories together. The Ukrainian Christmas is celebrated on January 7th, but it’s a different story.