Ukraine’s Orthodox Church may change the date of its Christmas

AFTER RUSSIAN soldiers invaded their country in 2014, many Ukrainians began favouring Western holidays over ones associated with Russia. Women’s Day, an originally socialist holiday that took hold in Soviet times, has faded, while the American-made Mother’s Day is in vogue. As the snow piled up in Christmas markets in December, so did the evidence that Santa Claus was displacing the Soviet-era (“Father Frost”) as the country’s pre-eminent bearded gift-bearer. Weightiest of all is the debate over when to celebrate Christmas itself. Epiphanius I, the head of Ukraine’s Orthodox Church, says he expects his congregants will favour switching from January 7th to December 25th within a decade.Why is there an issue with the date of Ukrainian Orthodox Christmas? It began with Russian Orthodoxy’s attachment to the 2,000-year-old Julian calendar, which observes too many leap years. The Russian church never adopted the calendar devised in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, which skips three leap years every four centuries. When the Soviet state went Gregorian in 1918, the Russian church did not. The Julian calendar now runs 13 days behind, so Christmas falls on January 7th—through 2099; in 2100, when the world next omits a leap year, it will move to January 8th. But in 2019 Ukraine’s Orthodox Church sealed its autonomy from the Moscow Patriarchate. It can now decide when to jingle its bells.