HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

As we prepare to greet the new millennium (or is it the last year of the old one? Opinions differ), Ukraine’s Santa Clauses (here called Grandfather Frost and transferred by the Soviet regime from Christmas to the more secular New Year) are busy spreading holiday cheer and felicitations, especially among the children. Here New Year is customarily rung in at home, but at the strike of twelve, anybody is welcome to visit anyone, and the serious partying lasts all night. Observing the Julian calendar, our Christmas comes after New Year but is no less merry for coming later. Indeed, for two weeks after New Year rings in the festivities until Julian calendar Epiphany rings it out, as the local saying has it, “even the chickens go around drunk,” which means practically nobody works, and everybody parties till they drop. We all look forward to this, our traditional winter bacchanalia, and hope your holidays will be as festive as ours. After all, we Ukrainians do know how to celebrate!

And the best present we can possibly look forward to is the authorities finally getting serious about reform. We feel we have done our bet by helping both the Ukrainian public and our readers abroad the crucial importance of doing precisely what the West is now forcing Ukraine, under the gun of certain bankruptcy without a bailout, to do. May the coming year be the one when Ukraine, potentially a world economic powerhouse, finally starts to get back on its feet. Now that would be something to celebrate!