Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone!

It's been a bit of a strange week in a nice way. John Saunders from the British Chess Magazine has published a link to my blog in his Chessbase article. Because of that I've had so many hits on my blog, from many countries all over the world, that it felt like a nice Christmas present to me. Thank you very much for everyone's comments and well-wishing. I hope you'll continue to follow my blog in the months to come.

Western Christmas is a bit of an odd holiday for me. For starters, Russians celebrate Christmas on the 7th January. However, that's a fairly new holiday for modern Russians because Christmas was "cancelled" during communist times and only re-instated less than 20 years ago. So, the tradition of celebrating Christmas has been lost for most Russian people and most just enjoy another day off work. Of course, Russian Christian Orthodox church continued to celebrate Christmas even during the communist times, but there were very few religious people in those days as it wasn't a good thing to be religious.

So, bearing all that in mind, I get a bit overwhelmed with how in the Western world so many people start preparing for Christmas and buying presents as early as September. I don't like the commercialism of the whole thing and the same Christmas music in every shop. I think Christmas is a great thing for kids but it doesn't have the same magic appeal to me I'm afraid. However, I do like the food! I'm going to cook a fantastic roast beef tomorrow (even though turkey is traditional in England, but I find it boring) with roast potatoes and parsnips, but no horrible brussels sprouts. And I love desserts, so I will certainly have lots of Christmas pudding with brandy butter. Are you hungry yet? I bet my cat can't wait for all the Christmas meal leftovers.