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Every year in late December, my childhood home transformed into a vision of American bliss. We’d gather to ornament a tree, drape string lights around the house, and sit down to an elaborate feast. Not long after dawn the next day, while our little sister still slept, my brother and I would impatiently sneak downstairs to see our gifts, which we understood to have been delivered by a kindly old man. It could have been a scene out of A Christmas Story. Except we weren’t celebrating Christmas. My family was celebrating the Soviet version of New Year’s, a holiday that resembles Christmas in nearly every way, except that it takes place almost a week later and excludes Jesus, God, or any other signifier of religion. We were keeping the national tradition alive in suburban America, years after the country that invented it had dissolved.