I can hear on the radio and in the church that the Ukrainian parishes are in need of generators to at least somewhat heat up the basements in which people find shelter from air raids. And there are more and more of them! Will we collect the money to light up the darkness of the Kyivan night with Advent light?
It is different this year – and even the frenzy of Christmas shopping fits into it. Because ladies Oksana, Olena and Natalia also buy – and send these purchases to their relatives so that they also have something for Christmas. They buy ordinary items because they simply don’t have them there. “Our” Mr. Sławek from Kharkov, an already friendly acquaintance, although suffering from a difficult disease, with a nine-year-old daughter and a weak wife, wants to go home: his old parents are there, the company is waiting for his IT skills, his heart is steaming to get there. They will go by train, although it’s into the cold and uncertainty, they will take a little bit of everything, because everything is missing there and they don’t really know what they will find out there. We’re not letting him go empty-handed. This year is different.
One Advent week, forty-one years ago, in the whistling wind and blizzard of Martial Law, in a deserted square in the center of the capital, a man in a big truck with Dutch number plate came up to my husband and threw a small, wrapped carton into his car, then shook his hand and left. It was a package from strangers from the Netherlands, in the basic set – so beautiful and touching at the time: coffee, tea, cocoa, cookies, dry sausage, tinned food, lentils, dried fruit and almonds with raisins – there were also Christmas greetings and cards in “santa clauses”. To this day we remember that extraordinary moment – when with every item unrolled from colored paper, we discovered signs of bonds with us and hope for us. It was also different then, but the package – a message from the world that had not forgotten about us – made this “difference” take on an unexpected dimension. Our Advent candle – which of course we had no head for at the time - suddenly burned with a warm glow.
Now it is us who will light such “candles” on Ukrainian tables: there is even no need to call for it, it’s been happening for 9 months. Well, we have even more to do, because it is completely different this year. – Oh, my Lord – do we say – reintroduce order at last because we already cannot manage! That’s why Christmas has to come.
And that’s why we need Advent so bad. All the more so because it will be different this year.
Barbara Sułek-Kowalska
Translated by Dominik Szczęsny-Kostanecki
TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists