Merry Christmas to all Christians!

This evening a large part of people on the Earth started to celebrate one of the greatest Christian holidays — Christmas Day. The church bells are chanting, carols glorifying the birth of God’s Son and His Mother are heard in the churches, decorated with New Year’s trees. People are congratulating each other, children receive presents, homemakers decorate tables with ever Christmas dishes. Many people recall the The Night Before Christmas by Gogol. The Great Holiday seems to remove the long winter night and routine misfortunes somewhere beyond the horizon.

The Day congratulates all Ukrainian citizens (in spite of their religion), who celebrate Christmas Day on this day and hope that other Ukrainians who have their Christmas ahead will not forget to congratulate them on their Great Holiday — in spite of any religious restrictions.

Why don’t all the Christians celebrate Christmas Day simultaneously? Unfortunately, all Christians were divided on the “calendar base” in 15th century and started to live according to different “styles”: the new and the old ones, which has grown into a new boundary between countries and people.

Who is celebrating the birth of Jesus according to the new style? These are believers of the Catholic Church, believers of the majority of Protestant churches as well as a large part of Orthodox churches headed by the Ecumenical Patriarch. This churches make 80 percent of Christians (today there is a total of two billion Christians in the world). Christmas is marked according to the old style by the Ukrainian orthodox churches and Greek- Catholics as well as Ruthenian, Serbian, Georgian and Jerusalem churches. (Peoples keeping the old style should lead, so to say, a “doubled” way of life: they use both ecclesiastic — Julian and secular — Gregorian — calendars).

Christmas has divided the flow of mankind’s time into two parts: “before Christ” and “Anno Domini” that was the start of new era in the life of a large part of humankind (today it is one-third of all the inhabitants of the Earth). Believing in Christ has made an immense impact upon the customs, morality, world’s outlook, science, philosophy and art of many peoples. They were united, despite their nationality, by a single name — Christians. It would be very hard to imagine Europe, i.e., humankind’s history if the thing that has happened 2,000 ago has not happened for some reason. So, in one way or another, all believers and atheists even if they are unaware of this.

The Day again congratulates all Christians, especially the readers of the newspaper on the Universal Holiday!