Soviet Moon Pickle
Almost 10 years ago, in June 2014, my family had a house fire. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but our attic went up in flames and the house was made uninhabitable by the water that saved it. Although in the weeks following the fire my husband made a Herculean effort to pull stuff from the attic, for a long time I thought my Christmas ornament collection had been destroyed. I’m a very sentimental person and every year I buy new ornaments that then became mementos of different times in my life. The loss of these ornaments was devastating and symbolic of all the losses the fire brought into our lives.
But I’m also a practical person and I knew that we would need ornaments for our tree so I started looking for some fun, new ornaments. That’s when I discovered New Year’s Day ornaments from the USSR. As you know, communists reject religion, “the opium of the masses”, so in 1929, Stalin abolished Christmas. It went over with the people so well that they brought it back in 1935 as a secular celebration of New Year’s. Whatever you might think of the Soviet Union and Christmas, the important thing to remember is that Soviet New Year’s Day Trees need Soviet New Year’s Day ornaments.
And that is how the Soviet Moon Pickle became a part of my ornament collection. You see, the Soviets made a ton of those old fashioned, glass ornaments and you can buy them on the internet. Etsy has a particularly wide offering. And they are not expensive and also very funky, very retro. Many of these ornaments come from Ukraine, amazingly you can buy stuff on the internet from people in this war torn country. I bought a handful of them, including a Russian wheat ear ornament, a funky abstract poison mushroom, and the Soviet moon pickle.
Eventually my husband opened a box that he had rescued from the attic and found my ornaments and the stockings I had made for my boys when they were little. We renovated that house, sold it, bought our current house and renovated it, It was not easy: it was almost two years of our lives and I cried every day at least once. But I survived one the the most traumatic experiences of my life and came out the other side.
My life path includes all the awful things that have happened to me, all the losses, disappointments, and grief. If they had not happenedI, I would not have learned some really important lessons about myself and life,. Right now I am sitting in my studio, looking out over my garden, surrounded by beauty. Right here and now, I know how lucky I am. And I also know that there will be more rough times ahead. Our Christmas Tree is still up and the Soviet Moon Pickle is front and center, reminding me that there is always another side, even though we cannot know what it will look like until we get there.