A brief lesson in Russian New Year tradition

In honor of this Christmas season, I thought I'd share with you all a holiday tradition that we Soviet ilk celebrate. Now I'm not Christian, though my love of pork products and my many subscriptions to anti-Semitic newsletters may have made you think otherwise, but my family does have a tree. A New Year's tree. You see, the Soviets, in their brazen attempt to be as cartoonishly supervillainous as possible actually banned Christmas in Russia. And much like the Nazis went East and West, conquering nations and purging them of Jews, the Soviets did the same with Christmas. The Poles, the Czechoslovaks, the Ukrainians, all these people were forced to surrender their most cherished holiday, and this time they weren't so eager to collaborate (that's right, fuck you, Poles).

One could call it a Christmolocaust... if one were so inclined.

But as we all know, because American cartoons and sitcoms have bludgeoned us nearly to death with this fucking point, canceling Christmas is like destroying our souls. You may as well outlaw smiles while you're at it. So Stalin and his crew had a great idea, "Maybe," he thought aloud, "we could cancel Christmas but then have like... New Year's trees and gifts and potato feasts, and there could be like... some fuckin' Santa thing that's, you know, totally Slavic or whatever." His henchmen nodded, "Yessirthatsoundsgreatpleasedontkillus." And the Russian people at large were too drunk to notice anything had changed at all.

What I'm going to share with you now is the story of our fuckin' Santa thing that's totally Slavic or whatever. His name is Deyt Maroz and he is not just an ersatz Santa. This is the tale my mother would tell me as she tucked me into bed on the eve of New Year's Eve, images of presents and pickled herring swirling around my little boy brain.

It all began in a time before… before there were czars, before peasants boiled beets and cabbage to make their meals, before bears roamed the snowy plains and mountainsides, before our blood was poisoned by the rapists of the Mongol horde. A purer time, a time of gods and magic.

The forest and its animals were ruled by a young god with great vision. He was friend to all manner of beast—bears brought to him the spoils of their hunt, the sparrows showered him in berries, chickens even offered to him their eggs. He spent his days polishing stones into fish, making sure the flowers bloomed bright, and the trees rained enough nuts for all the squirrels and chipmunks. He spent his free time conjuring up new plants, new animals, to fill the canvas of the forest. He had it pretty good, he thought, life was pretty simple.



The goddess of death didn’t have it quite so good. You see, the forest god was an orphan, so he didn’t have to deal with divine Slavic parents getting all up in his shit all the time. “Ven veel vee be see-inks grant-child?!” Her mother badgered, “You ahr neer terty! Yo vant be hyag?! Hyag veef cats, cat-hyag?! Expektahnsee of laiyf eez ohnly feeftee yeers fer Slav-gods.”



“Yees,” nodded her father, “Slav-god govr-mhent cohr-oopt, dok-tors eez bad, alk-hol aboos pahn-dyemic. You haf behbee naow!”

The goddess of death left her family’s one bedroom underworld apartment intent on finding a man to marry and finally satisfy the expectations of her overbearing, intrusive parents. This would be the day, she thought, for she had a plan.

Now this plan may not seem too novel for us now, but mind you, these were the gods. They invented fire, wind, water; all this shit was new to them. On this day, the goddess of death invented a scheme that many Slavic women would come to rely on: she would find a man, get him drunk, fuck him (or, rather, get him to fuck her as she stared vacantly at the ceiling), get pregnant, and shame him into marriage. It was foolproof.

Trouble was, the divine Slavic realm was full of absolute creeps and weirdos. The god of the sea smelled and was missing teeth, the god of the sky was alarmingly overweight… and also smelled and… well, was missing teeth, the god of war had really greasy hair and a gaudy fashion sense. Slavic god men just did not know how to take care of themselves. And so she wandered and wandered, feeling more and more miserable with each and every step. That is, until she wandered into the forest.

And there he was. He was rugged, muscular, his teeth were alright and he smelled kinda piney: the forest god, frolicking around with his animal friends.

“Hyello!” she waved, “vat is name ahf yours?”

The forest god stopped mid-frolick to see who it was calling to him. Now, I should probably mention, the forest god had always been something of a recluse… I mean, he lived in the forest, after all. The closest he’d ever come to a she-gods touch was that one time he choked out a deer and fucked it. But here, right in the god-flesh, a bona fide female deity.

“mmm,” he thought, “I nyever mahch eento moteef ahf goff but mehbee kinky, yes?” Having convinced himself that hooking up with a goth chick might be pretty cool, he galloped over to her side (did I mention he had horse feet? He had horse feet.).

“Hyelo!” he said, “Ahy ehm goht off fohrest. I do makeenks of ahnmals.”

“You vant get dreenk wif me?” asked the goddess, coyly.

“Oh-khey!” agreed the forest god.

So they drank and drank until finally the goddess said, in the most romantic voice she could must, “You want make fah-kings in mine vah-gina weef pehynis of yours haveenk?”

The forest god narrowed his eyes, “Is you comeenks on to meez?”

“Yehs.”

“Oh,” replied the forest god. He promptly began wrapping his hands around her throat.

“Wat you doink?!” she yelled, shocked.

“Eez how I makah da fahk in foh-rest wif deers.”

“Oh, oh-khey,” replied the goddess of death, rolling her eyes up to the sky, going temporarily catatonic.

Pretty soon it was over. The forest god woke up alone the next day, feeling pretty good about himself. He called over the bears and tigers and bragged about his conquest. Months had passed as the forest god continued frolicking merrily and free. But then, one day, a letter arrived via… uh… bird, or something: the goddess of death was pregnant!

“Sheet” lamented the forest god, knowing he had but one course of action: marry the goddess. He’d considered suicide but even then he’d be cast into the realm of the dead, where her big ‘ol fuckin’ hard-on of a dad would harass him for eternity. “Fahk eet,” he sighed, and conjured a ring out sticks and stones and whatever.

As he marched into the underworld, the trees wept in his wake, their leaves falling to the ground, their limbs shriveling. A coldness crept onto the forest.

The two promptly got married and the goddess never lost her baby weight. Every year, for but a few months, the forest god managed to get her off his fucking back so he could finally get some work done in this goddamn hellhole GODDAMMIT and he’d storm back into the forest to conjure. But the magic inside him… just wasn’t quite there anymore. He couldn’t think of new animals to make, he could barely make the trees drop enough nuts for the squirrels, make enough grass for the rabbits, enough fish for the bears. “Veel you stohp ryidings ahf ass-mine?!” he found himself screaming at a bear. He couldn’t concentrate, he just wanted to forget about everything and just jump off a bridge or something.



The goddess of death let herself go pretty hard after marriage.

It’s worth nothing he also looked like shit. He had bags under his eyes, his hair’d started falling out, he’d started gaining weight from all the booze. But he was too dead inside to care.




His son, who they named something totally unpronounceable but who I will refer to as Sergei because that's sufficiently generically Slavic, was a sensitive young lad. Kinda gloomy like his mother, but also creative like his father. He spent his time taking black and white photographs of railroad tracks and empty shacks and writing poems about the darkness inside him (remember, this is way back when in the olden-god times, before this shit was totally lame).





One day Sergei approached his father, who was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking, “Fazer, I vant to go to skool ahf stadees ahf ahrt to be arhteest.”

“Noh fagh-yot sohn of mine havinks vil be major of ahrt! You be dohkt-or and make-ah de mohnee fer mazer and me for the livinks!” Grumbled the forest god, his hairy, skin-tagged man-bosoms sinking deep into his mustard-stained sleeveless t-shirt.

Sergei’s heart sank into the deep, dark pits of his stomach. He could feel his veins twist into knots, his blood curdle with anger, “YOU ARE DEH FAHK!” he screamed, his eyes mashing down on tears he could no longer hold back, “I AM NO FAGH-YOT YOU ARE DEH FAHK WHO MAKEENGS DAH GAY I VIL SHOW YOU!” He grabbed his leather jacket and bolted out the cramped studio apartment the Slavic gods called their home.

He ran off, past the outer boundaries of their apartment complex, past the rundown park, past the Hasidic neighborhood and Chinatown and that part where all the Puerto Ricans lived, right into the forest. The dark, cold, neglected forest. “Ahy nhot gay! I veel shyow who gay! I veel maka-de-sex veef woman!” Fueled by rage and passion and teenage libido, he got down on his knees, grabbed clumps of snow (yeah, there’s snow because it’s like winter now since the forest god's all gone and stuff, it's solid symbolism right there), and started assembling a real, proper woman to have sex with and show everybody that he was totally straight.

He poked eye-holes with his fingers, pulled down his pants, and whipped out his forked demon dick and started plowing the shit out of this mound of snow. He came fury, the magic of his god cum brought the snow girl to life. “Hyelo!” she shouted, awakening for the first time, “ahy ehm Sneygurochka (Russian for maiden of snow-cum) eez naice meetings weef yous you seem goot mahn, haf job, yes? You veel poot reeng on fyeenger mine! I not whore! I vant baybee!” She began spouting declaration after declaration about commitment and joint bank accounts and all this shit that Sergei just couldn’t handle so he punched right through her snowy skull, right the hell through.

Stunned and shaken, Sergei stared at his trembling hand; he unraveled his fingers and his eyes tensed at the site of snow-brains twitching in his palm, "Fahk," he whispered. But not even spectacular, magical murder could shake Sergei of his resolve. He grabbed the limp snow-girl's feet and dragged her body behind some trees and tried again. And again. And again.

But he soon found that snow beneath his feet was getting packed and hard. It was nigh unusable for the purposes of sculpting a fine lady friend. He needed some fresh powder, but he couldn't just make it snow, after all, he didn't inherit that kind of power from his old man. "Vat to do, vat to do..." he thought, "Ah!" an idea struck him from above, so he looked up. And what did he see? Trees! The pine trees, still green in the winter, covered in layers and layers of fine snow. So he knocked the trees over, grabbed them by their trunks, and ran his palm against their bristles, knocking loose all that snow.

He kept at it for a long while. He'd been at it so long, in fact, that Spring was now nearly upon the forest, which meant the forest god's return. Sergei noticed the snow begin to melt and drip off the trees, the budding blades of grass beneath his feet, and he began to panic. He knew that if his father came by and saw all the trees scattered about that he'd totally lose his shit. He had to think fast.

He ran around the forest, panicking, trying to find some serendipitous source of inspiration, "Hyalp me, bear!" he pleaded, "Hyalp me fauchs! Hyalp me crokadeel!" But alas, his pleas fell on deaf ears, for the animals knew but one master, the forest god himself. When all seemed lost, out of nowhere there appeared a small group of children, doing the things Russian children tended to do in the woods--burying their middle-aged grandparents and passing around a small flask of crudely distilled grain alcohol.

Sergei dashed over to them quickly, his genitals flapping and slapping his thighs, "Cheeldren! You mahst hyalp me! Take trees ay haf ahp-rooted to hauses of yorz and I veel pahy you backs mooch!" The children, being obedient and pure of heart as children tended to be because they were beaten regularly and I turned out fine so shut up and get me a beer, did exactly what that giant, naked demon requested and dragged the trees back into their homes.

When the forest god finally arrived, he found not a single fucked up tree, just a pile of dead girls. "Vat eez dees?" he asked. "Oh! Ah..." Sergei stammered, "...I try use god-majeek ahnd make-a deh veemen for dah sex."

"You make-ah dah veemen of snow?"

"Yehs."

"Theys in gooht shape, weef boozom."

"Yehs."

"But you no layke?"

"They eez deemahndings ahf tyme ahn mohneez ahn attentions."

"You try eemproof?"

"Yehs, ahy try make-a deh veemens weefout bohx ahf voice ahn brain of want."

"You make-a for me too?"

"Okhey."

His father nodded approvingly, finally accepting his son and his artistic passions, in exchange for the promise of a perfected concubine down the road. So Sergei continued sculpting every winter, making new girls, killing the shitty ones, knocking over trees, talking to kids, and so on and so on. Because snow-concubines don't do too well in the heat, even the good ones didn't last too long. As the seasons cycled, so did the workload.




At home, the children covered the trees with decorations and stuff because why not. And Sergei, true to his word, went from home to home and wherever he saw a tree, he would leave a gift (usually a turnip or possibly an amusingly shaped rock of some sort) to honor his eternal debt to the children. He used his snow concubines to help him find and deliver all these wonderful presents.

And he was forever known as Deyt Maroz, deyt being Russian for “debt”, maroz does not have a direct English translation, the best I can muster is “pulsing forked demon cock”.