Celebrations diverse but sentiments are the same

For many Canadians, whether religious or secular, Christmas and New Year’s Day have now come and gone in a swirl of wrapping paper and a receding echo of carols. There is also, to be honest, the occasional feeble whimper from those still hungover souls who celebrated too well, if not too wisely.

But for almost 280 million Orthodox Christians, both in Canada and around the world, the central festivities celebrating the birth of Jesus are just about to begin.

And when that’s done, Canadians of Chinese ancestry — and many other citizens, since Chinese culture has been part of Vancouver since the city’s founding — will celebrate New Year according to the old Chinese calendar. This year, the Year of the Horse, the Chinese New Year falls on Friday, Jan. 31.

For adherents to the Orthodox Christian tradition, Christmas falls on what for mainstream Canadians is Jan. 7. So Monday will be Christmas Eve for many of the congregations of Russian, Greek, Ukrainian, Serbian, Ethiopian and other Orthodox churches.

For these Christians, who believe themselves inheritors of the ancient church that existed before a great disagreement split Christianity into two major traditions about a thousand years ago — one following practice in Rome and the other in Byzantium — Christmas is still celebrated on Dec. 25. But their calendar just happens to lag the calendar that the rest of us take for granted, which means that for Orthodox Christians, the big day falls at the beginning of what is the second week of January to those following the Western mainstream’s official calendar.

That’s because the Orthodox or Eastern rite follows the older Julian calendar, established in 45 B. C. by Julius Caesar. He reformed the traditional but cumbersome Roman method of calculating dates. Western Christians follow the even more modern Gregorian calendar, adopted by a Roman Catholic pope in 1582 to improve upon eccentricities in the Julian calendar. The Gregorian method of calculating dates eventually became the accepted standard, even for countries like Russia where the Eastern church is the mainstream, while the older Julian method prevails for Orthodox religious purposes.

The Orthodox festivities early next week and the Chinese New Year observances 24 days later serve as a reminder of just how broad, diverse and tolerant our annual celebration has become.

In China and for many people of Chinese descent in Vancouver and elsewhere, the official calendar is also Gregorian, in compliance with global convention. However, the civil calendar, the one used to choose auspicious days for weddings or funerals and to determine the first day of the New Year, is the calendar reformed by the Han Emperor Wu in 104 B. C., ironically, right around the birth of Julius Caesar, that other great calendar reformer.

For Christians, there’s a 13 day difference between the Julian and the Gregorian systems for establishing dates. It’s since become even more complicated. For convenience, some Orthodox churches in the West have since adopted the ubiquitous Gregorian standard. Orthodox churches in Russia and the Middle East prefer to conform to the older Julian calendar, which, just to complicate matters even further, was itself reformed again following a special synod in 1923.

Nevertheless, while there are differences in date and liturgy between the two major branches of Christian observance, the core spiritual values evoked by Christmas observances remain essentially the same whichever Dec. 25 is used.

Some devout adherents will begin their Orthodox Christmas on Monday with Bible readings and communion rites in the morning, will then fast through the day until the appearance of the first star in the night sky, at which time a special ritual Holy Night supper will be eaten.

It’s a vegetarian meal with a separate dish prepared to represent each of the 12 apostles, followed by carols, a vigil, more Bible readings, anointing with holy oil and other religious rites. On Christmas Day there’s another church service and on the third day yet more celebrations in honour of the Virgin Mary.

Theological scholars observe that although the Orthodox Christmas is as replete with trees, decorations, gifts and merrymaking as are the celebrations with which Western Christians are familiar, there’s a stronger, slightly more conservative focus on the sacred than tends to occur in much of the increasingly secularized Christmas that predominates in the mainstream. Of course, many Western Christians observe the sacred with no less intensity, it’s just that this now occurs within the context of a much bigger and more inclusive vision of the holiday that has come to embrace almost everyone.

All in all, the Orthodox festivities early next week and the Chinese New Year observances 24 days later serve as a reminder of just how broad, diverse and tolerant our annual celebration has become. And that makes this an opportune moment to wish all those Canadians and British Columbians who celebrate Orthodox Christmas observances according to the Julian calendar or the Chinese New Year determined by the ancient Han calendar, the merriest of Christmases and a Gung Hay Fat Choy!