For the third consecutive year, Yury Luzhkov gave an official mayoral stamp to the Russian Orthodox Christmas, anointing it with all the deliberate glitz of New Year's.


As an enormous hot-air balloon bobbed above Tverskaya Ulitsa and ear-splitting folk music ricocheted off the former Mossoviet building, bystanders marveled at what must be Russia's most upwardly mobile holiday. By comparison with the West's frenzied consumerism, Russian Orthodox Christmas remained over the years a purely religious holiday. Associated secular traditions like kolyada, or caroling, and gadaniye, seasonal fortune-telling, became more the stuff of cultural anthropology than greeting cards.


Not for long, if Luzhkov has anything to say about it.


Although the mayor marked the day by a speech at the ceremonial founding of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, downtown his own party was going on with less pomp and more face paint. This year's official merrymaking -- fully bankrolled by Philip Morris, the American tobacco company -- was split into "New Year's on Tverskaya" and "Christmas on Tverskaya." Both lined up a range of folk ensembles, dancers and nondenominational estrada acts.


Lyuba Rachotina, the only member of the city's cultural committee to show up at work Monday, allowed that Christmas has already made the transition to official legitimacy.


"I can't say that it's a very religious holiday for me, since I don't go to church, but I'm glad it has come back," said Rachotina. "For instance, we have the day off," she added. "Let's hope it stays official."


For Orthodox Russians, some of whom kept religious traditions faithfully throughout the Soviet era, the boisterous city celebrations seemed far removed from their own rites.


Yakov Krotov, a journalist raised in the Russian Orthodox faith, said when he watched the celebrations on television he was "deeply ... not even disappointed, but resentful, because in form, in style, in spirit, all of these events are absolutely Bolshevistic, absolutely Soviet." Official Christmas was a carbon copy of official New Year's, and "that's a blasphemy, from my point of view," he said.


Luzhkov is not a religious man himself, but pays tribute to Orthodox holidays "out of the necessity to replace the old ideology with something new. Everything was done in an absolutely improper manner," Krotov added.


Russia's gradual return to the Jan. 7 holiday has an obvious historical precedent, said Father Christopher Hill, an English-born priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. The original date of Christmas was established under the Roman empire to distinguish it from the pagan Victory of the Sun, an occasion on which ancient Romans "behaved themselves quite abominably, drinking and carrying on," Hill said. But gradually,the holiday took on the secular elements it was supposed to avoid.


A parallel transition is taking place in Russia now, Hill said, and confessed to a little nostalgia. "When I first came here, 10 years ago, one of the odd and yet pleasing things was not being bombarded with commercials, the way we were in the West," he said. "It seems to me that New Year's is slowly becoming transferred to Christmas again," Hill said. "Whether people will catch on to the idea of God becoming man, that I can't tell."


Others were less critical. Pensioner Alisa Vashirovna, 56, watched curiously as a New-Agey dance troupe culminated its performance with the release of several dozen white doves around the statue of Yury Dolgoruky. All during her childhood, she said, her Christmases were marked by pilgrimages to churches outside the city, where believers gathered inconspicuously for mass.


"We always celebrated Christmas, but quietly," she said, as a laser show played on the Moscow City Construction building. "It's right that Luzhkov should do this. He wants happiness in the streets."


This year's celebrations were the most open to date, said Tamara Nekulina, 66. "It has never been so public," Nekulina said. "In such a difficult time, it's especially important" to celebrate, she added. "Look at this beauty, this singing, this dancing. This makes it easier for people to survive."