I’ve never been a very big fan of New Year’s Eve. To me, it means the holidays are winding down and it’s time to go back to school.

Here, it means the holidays are just getting started.

It is my understanding, and this is based on observation and word of mouth, not research, not even Wikipedia, that during Soviet times Christmas traditions were shifted to New Year’s just as pagan traditions were once incorporated into Christian holidays. That means you have a Grandfather Frost, who looks a lot like Santa, and he has a helper to assist him in handing out gifts (her name is Snegorochka and she’s his granddaughter). There are New Year’s trees to decorate and New Year’s gifts to exchange. New Year’s Eve begins as a family holiday and then after midnight people go out and meet friends.

Even though Christmas is once again a permissible holiday, New Year’s Eve has kept its place as the more prominent holiday. There are New Year’s themed movies. This year the hit is New Year’s Tariff, about a phone plan that calls back in time one year. Then there’s the classic, Irony of Fate or Enjoy Your Bath!, a Soviet equivalent of It’s a Wonderful Life, at least in the annual viewing sense.

If New Year’s Tariff taught me anything more substantial than MTS is the best company to buy a sim card from (the movie is essentially a hollywood style hour and a half long ad for the biggest cell phone provider), it’s that Red Square is the best place to be for New Year’s. Which makes sense—the country’s biggest holiday in the country’s most renowned square.

So, Hannah and I watched Irony of Fate today and then went to Red Square. We were a little early, which meant the lines to get through security were not very long, but it also meant most people there were other tourists who thought like we did, that New Year’s is celebrated in the hours leading up to midnight and then everything winds down. It turns out midnight for many Russians is when things begin, when the teenagers are allowed to leave the family party and go out with their friends.

We avoided the tourists, but a group of Russians walking past heard our English and one of them asked for a photo with us, probably to be able to say, “Look! I met Americans! Real live Americans!” and we shrugged, smiled for the picture, and the group walked away. Well, then another Russian decided he also needed a photo with us. And another. The next person to approach us asked how much we were charging. I answered 100 rubles and he believed me until we started laughing.

We spent the rest of the night walking around to keep our toes from freezing. There was such an atmosphere of excitement, it didn’t feel like we were just waiting around but like the saying goodbye to the old year was part of the party. There was a wide mix of celebrants—the uniformed guards, the skaters on the Red Square Rink, the tourists, the average Russians, the people with light up devil horns (possibly because it’s the year of the bull?), the huddled groups who had managed to sneak champaign past the security guards. At midnight there were fireworks and cheers and after a bit people started migrating to the metro.

It was more fun and climatic than any New Year’s Eve I’ve experienced before. But it was still New Year’s. I had hoped that maybe celebrating the holiday here would give me some profound insight into why Russians hold it so dear, but I find that the only thing that will be different after this December 31st is the same thing I encounter every year: I’ll have trouble writing the correct date until at least March.

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