New Year's Day is the most popular and favourite holiday in Russia and it is celebrated a week before the Orthodox Christmas. People buy a New Year Tree - it can be a pine or a fir-tree which is called 'yolka' or 'yolochka', and decorate it with shiny glass and paper toys, tinsel, ornaments and colouful lights.
Children are invited to numerous New Year parties and Christmas-tree Shows. Very often Ded Moroz (Grandafather Frost) and his granddaughter Snegurochka (Snow Maiden) bring presents and hand them to children, or leave them under the New Year Tree at night when the children are sleeping after the long New Year feast.
The festive New Year dinner is a special meal with lots of snacks, salads, meat and other delicious food, as well as sweets, cakes and what not. Tangerines is New Year's fruit, and it is one of its symbols. Russian salad (Salade Olivier), which is easy to cook, but tasty and filling, is a traditional dish of the Russian festive table.
One can't imagine New Year's night without the Kremlin Clock Chimes. The Kremlin Clock is a historic clock on the Spasskaya Tower of the Moscow Kremlin. Every New Year night hundreds of people gather in Red Square in Moscow to celebrate the coming new year. Millions of people watch TV and a few minutes before the clock strikes twelve, they listen to the President's "New Year Speech". It is a tradition to fill wine glasses with the Soviet Champagne and raise a toast to a Happy New Year.
There is a lot of merry-making everywhere. People dance, sing, enjoy tv programmes, or go outside to watch fireworks.
(Images of New Year postcards by V.Zarubin. Source: LiveJournal)
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