They start decorating the Christmas trees in Denver even before they have finished the leftovers from their Thanksgiving turkeys. By Dec.1, every tree on my block is decked out in lights. Looking at them, I can't help thinking that the bells will start tolling in the new year at any moment. And I start thinking about past New Years, like milestones marking out the path my generation has traversed.


The New Year's tree is my very first childhood memory. My nanny is holding me in her arms and I am trying to understand the incomprehensible: A tree is growing in the middle of our apartment. Even from my limited experience, I know that trees grow outdoors, during the summer, at the dacha. But this tree smells of needles and snow, and mama is hanging my toys on the branches. I don't like this very much, but as I'm getting ready to strike out in anger, mama puts my toys down and starts hanging her own. A necklace of clear beads appears -- how I love to play with those hard, cool little balls! -- then a shiny chain and a little silver bottle that once held perfume.


"Here, use my ties!" my father offers with a hearty laugh.


His voice comes from somewhere overhead. I raise my eyes and see him standing on the window sill, nailing a sheet of thick black paper over the window with tiny silver nails. I become frightened as the window is covered over, and I press myself tighter to my nanny.


"The child will tell someone about the tree. There will be trouble," my nanny growls in a low voice.


"She doesn't even know how to talk," my father answers cheerfully. "Who is going to figure out her babbling?"


"Someone will," my nanny warns.


It was the beginning of the 1930s, a short period when the Soviet authorities actually banned New Year's trees. That is why my parents blacked out the window; that is why my nanny, Marusya, was so frightened; that is why we had no proper decorations for the tree.


But my young parents refused to give in. They were trying to maintain at least the appearance of normal human life. There were no two ways about it: If there is a child in the house, there must be a New Year's tree.


1938. The height of Stalin's terror. For more than a month Moscow has not slept, tensely awaiting uninvited guests. Wasn't that a van pulling up in front of the house? Did the elevator stop on this floor?


Just before Christmas, the danger confronts our family directly. The country's best-known journalist, a hero of the Spanish Civil War, Mikhail Koltsov, is arrested. Koltsov is the editor in chief of the popular weekly magazine Ogonyok, where my mother works.


Children in those days could feel with certainty the dark threat hanging over their houses. I will never forget my amazement and joy when I understood that the holiday about which I had not dared even to dream would take place after all.


"If there is a child in the house, then there has to be a tree," my father says. "While ... " He doesn't say the rest aloud, but we know what he is thinking: "While there is still someone here to decorate it. Will our little girl still have a mother and father this time next year?"


1942. War. My mother, my elderly grandmother and I are in evacuation in the tiny town of Chistopole. Father is away at the front. We live only for his letters and for news bulletins from the war.


A letter arrived! Father is alive. That means we can talk about him and mention his name without fear. I try not to think about something that is obvious even to children: While his letter was traveling, he might have been ... No, even in my mind I could never bring myself to pronounce the word "killed."


"If there is a child in the house, there has to be a tree," my mother says, without much confidence in her voice. She takes any job she can get, but the little town is full of evacuated intellectuals, and no one is very eager to hire them. They don't know how to harness horses or chop wood. We barely have enough for porridge without butter or milk. In the summer and fall, we children steal from the neighbors' gardens, eating the raw vegetables so the grownups won't find out what we'd done. But during the long winter months, there is nothing.


Somehow though my mother manages to put together a celebration. We have guests: my friends from the school for evacuated children. There is a tree, a short but full and aromatic pine. There is a cake made of flour and honey.


Seeing my mother's efforts, the woman from whom we rent our single room goes out to her shed and brings back an ice-covered box full of decorations for the tree. She puts them on our tree herself and gives the extra ones to us children to play with. I am overjoyed, and I run over to my mother and beg her -- in order to make my joy complete -- to put on her best dress and my favorite necklace of clear beads. I can't remember what she said, but I remember that I was devastated. Only many years later did I learn that she had traded the dress and the necklace to an old woman at the market for some flour and a jar of honey.


1949. My father is declared a "cosmopolitan," "an antipatriot." I am reading about it in the newspapers, but I cannot understand.


How can this be? He fought for his country; he has a whole chest full of medals. Who is a patriot if not someone like him? And how can the paper be called Pravda, if it prints lies about my father?


In school, the other children try not to look in my direction. Their mothers won't let them visit me. The telephone stops ringing; no one knocks at our door. But on Jan. 1 we have a visitor. A tall, elegant woman with miraculous gray hair around her young face. Her name is Lidia Chukovskaya, and in later days I will learn a lot from her. But on this day I get my first, invaluable lesson: When misfortune strikes a home and everyone turns away, the only thing you can do is go there as often as you can.


1953. We do not know yet that this is the last New Year of Stalin's terror. I celebrate in the joyous company of my fellow students at one of their houses. Just as the clock begins to strike midnight, our host raises his glass of champagne and pronounces a toast: "To Stalin!"


No, I don't leap from the table in a rage, slamming the door behind me. I obediently raise my glass to my lips, but I do not drink. I am not capable of more. With horror, I think, what if my family finds out?


1957. It is like the beginning of a new era. We believe that freedom has finally come, that it is finally spring. How are we to know that this is merely the thaw before new frosts?


We can't make ourselves sit peacefully at home around the tree. We spend the whole night wandering the streets of Moscow, shouting out verses that just recently had been banned. We talk hurriedly about who has just gotten back from the camps. I hear the name Konstantin Bogatyryov, but I have no idea that I will meet him in 25 days, and that in only six months we will be married.


1963. We greet the New Year in the company of some American friends. Imagine! Americans in our house! There aren't very many of them in Moscow, and they can feel they are being followed, that no one wants to talk to them. We don't even dare to invite any of our other friends over that night. Too risky.


1969. The end of 1968 marked the end of the Thaw. Soviet tanks in Prague left us no hope, no illusions. Demonstrators are arrested. A new wave of searches passes over Moscow. Just before New Year's, some friends bring us a whole suitcase of samizdat that they want us to hide for them.


After that, all the New Years seem to run together. The Thaw was over, and the cheerless years of stagnation dragged on. But New Year's was a happy time nonetheless. The holidays demanded unspeakable efforts. It wasn't a matter of "buying," but of "managing to get" a tree, gifts, something to feed the guests.


Now, when I see how easily and thoughtlessly my American neighbors celebrate the holidays, I ask myself: Did we waste all that time and effort for nothing? After all, we were plenty short of both back in those days.


No, it was not for nothing. New Year's wasn't just a holiday. It was the only nonpolitical, human holiday we had. It contained within itself many things -- first of all, a feeling of stability, of continuity. Unlike May 1 or Nov. 7, our grandparents and great grandparents had celebrated New Year's.


There was also a feeling of belonging. New Year's is celebrated around the world, almost everywhere on Jan.1. And this formed a fine thread that connected us to that part of the world beyond the Iron Curtain.


And there was a feeling of independence. Nothing in this holiday came from "Soviet power." This holiday was not a gift from the state.


And there was a tiny taste of freedom. We could celebrate New Year's the way we wanted to. All the other holidays had a strict regime -- "ceremonial meetings," followed by hours of marching around with banners and signs and fake smiles.


And finally there was a touch of religion. New Year's falls right between Western Christmas and Orthodox Christmas. And the gifts and the tree and the holiday that we all called "New Year's" were really "Christmas." It was our only chance to celebrate anything religious in front of others, without hiding in fear.


This year I will meet the New Year at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. I think I'll raise my first toast to the holiday itself. And to our faith in it, which helped us preserve our human dignity even through the darkest times.





Sofia Bogatyryova is a literary critic and freelance journalist living in Denver, Colorado. She contributed this article to The Moscow Times.