A few minutes before the clock struck midnight for the new year, 1989, the state-sponsored holiday variety show on TV stopped. The president was about to make a speech congratulating our nation, the Bulgarian people, on the arrival of the new year.
No one cared what he’d say but everyone I knew would watch: my friends, my parents’ friends, my classmates, even my hip older cousin who usually went to parties where people wore actual Levi’s jeans and smoked Western cigarettes like Lucky Strike. Not because it was a good speech—it wasn’t—but simply because nothing else was going on. In communism, one never had FOMO.
I was eight. We had just finished family dinner and I’d helped my mother clear the table. Now, as she washed the dishes in the kitchen, I sat in the living room watching my father set up the backgammon game. We played every night. My younger brother was in his room taking apart his new toy truck to “see how it worked.”
The sweet smell of ripe tangerines in a bowl mixed with the pine scent from our Christmas tree (though for us it was a New Year’s tree)—tangerines and oranges were a festive New Year’s fruit—they only appeared in shops for a few days around the holiday.
The president started speaking. My father turned down the volume and continued arranging the pieceson the lacquered wood board. Our New Year’s tree sparkled, so tall that its top bent against the ceiling. At its base, a delicate toy train made in Hungary circled on its track through fake cotton snow. This delighted my father as much as us, his kids.
Usually on weekends and holidays, my parents’ friends gathered in our living room to catch up and discuss films and books. They were a lively group of film directors, writers, computer scientists, musicians and mathematicians with beards, wool sweaters, jeans and long hair. The women wore glasses and dangling earrings. They all ate cheesy pretzels, smoked cigarettes and drank wine. Occasionally, someone who’d had the privilege to attend a conference or a research seminar abroad projected a slideshow on the wall with photographs from his or her trip, showing faraway places few of them would even be allowed to visit: Tokyo, New York, the jungles of Columbia. Niagara Falls once took up our entire living room wall. I usually watched from a corner, sitting on the floor quietly practicing drawing horses in my sketchbook next to my brother, who deconstructed some gadget. Tonight, though it was our country’s biggest celebration, my parents were not having a party. I suspected it was because instead of wine, his frequent usual, my father was drinking a non-alcoholic drink he made of water and a few drops of mint essence. Whenever he was trying to quit alcohol, he preferred not to socialize so as not to be tempted. Now, his mocktail was so strong that when he put it on the table next to the backgammon board, it made my eyes water. “It soothes my stomach,” my father said.
Suddenly: three quick taps on the front door.
We had only lived in the building for four years. It was brand new and located in the city center, next to the University of Sofia and the American ambassador’s residence. Still, the doorbell and elevator had never worked. My father raised his head like a deer, cupped his left ear (he had poor hearing) and angled it toward the front door. He looked at me: had he heard something?
The knocking had been so light that I myself wasn’t sure. My mother was still in the kitchen with the water running and the dishes clattering. She certainly hadn’t heard.
My father nodded toward the door—“Go check,” he was saying.
As the youngest person present, it was my responsibility to run small errands such as answering the phone or the door or carrying water or snacks from the kitchen. I tip-toed toward the front door, wondering who it could be on the most important holiday of the year, right around midnight.
Since we lived near the city center, it was normal for my parents’ friends to stop by at any time. But it was New Year’s Eve, the most festive, most important holiday, and people usually made plans ahead of time. It could be a neighbor. It was common for the woman on our floor to drop in to ask for an onion or a red bell pepper she lacked to make her family’s meal, or to ask to borrow some chairs for a dinner party that got too large. But it was late and most people had eaten already. Plus, on special holidays, one prepared meals ahead of time and asked for chairs ahead of time, too. Who could it be during the president’s speech and right as the clock was about to strike midnight?
I looked through the peephole—my father had made sure to install it low enough so my brother and I could reach it—but there was no one.
“Who is it?” I said. I wasn’t supposed to open without asking first.
No one answered.
I asked again.
No answer.
I put my ear to the door. Total quiet. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck bristled.
I sloooooowly opened the door.
There was no one. The staircase landing smelled clean and earthy, like the park after rain. The woman who cleaned the common spaces must have mopped for the holiday. But on the landing between our apartment and our neighbors’ lay a box the size of a huge birthday cake, wrapped in light blue snowflake-patterned paper, tied with a red ribbon. A gift.
I glanced back into the apartment. I could see my mother cutting carrots for our post-dinner snack, my father staring at the backgammon board, sipping his mint drink, lost in thought. The president’s speech droned on in the background. I stepped on the landing and peeked up and down the stairs to see if anyone was hiding. They weren’t.
I bent down to take a closer look at the box. It was bright and beautiful and smelled of pinecones. I picked it up. It had a hefty, serious weight. A book? No, it was bigger than a book.
And then I saw: my name!
It was written on a white label in neat, cursive handwriting, the way we were taught in school. But the handwriting was not of anyone I recognized. My grandmother’s was round and often clumsy like a young girl’s—her Os and As were disproportionately large compared to her other letters; my aunt’s was tight and precise like the legal scholar she was; my grandfather’s squiggly and sharp like a spider’s legs. It couldn’t be a neighbor’s either—they would have written both mine and my brother’s names and would sign their own names.
My cheeks flushed hot with excitement.
During socialism in Bulgaria, Santa Claus—or “Grandfather Frost,” as we called him—arrived on New Year’s Eve instead of Christmas because the communist government had replaced all religious holidays with secular ones. The Christians did that to the pagans after the adoption of Christianity so this, it seemed, was some twisted historical payback.
I knew that there was no Grandfather Frost in reality because my father had trained me in science and logical thinking. Once, when I was six, prompted by my question, “Where do humans come from?” he embarked on a long, detailed explanation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. We were walking through an old city park on a warm autumn afternoon. The trees were turning yellow and red and formed a colorful tunnel around us. I had wanted a simple, easy answer. But that was never the case with my father. I listened patiently as I always did when he spoke, eager to catch all the details and follow the logical explanation and tried to keep up with his pace, taking two or three steps for every one of his, for he was tall and a fast walker. But as he spoke of things I couldn’t comprehend, my mind wandered to the fallen chestnuts and acorns and how I wanted to collect some to make tiny animals and people with toothpicks as we had done in art class. I didn’t catch the end of the lesson of evolution or what had happened to Darwin. I don’t remember this part but when my father finished, I allegedly said, “You can say what you want but I know I came from my mother’s stomach and not from a monkey.” This story occasionally came up at family gatherings and caused the adults to laugh uproariously and me to redden with embarrassment. I felt shy because I became the center of attention, yet I also craved such attention.
So I knew—of course—that Grandfather Frost did not exist. Obviously, it was also impossible to drop off gifts at the same time to every household in the world. That would be superhuman and magical and magic didn’t exist.
My closest friends too—Rose, Plamen and Dimitar—knew that Grandfather Frost wasn’t real and that it was our parents’ who bought us gifts, wrapped them and put them under the tree at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Our parents were also responsible for packaging a smaller, more modest gift—a notebook or some tangerines, maybe colored pencils—and entrusting it to our teacher, who would then sneak it to Grandfather Frost when he visited our kindergarten or school. As we sat on his lap and a professional photographer snapped a photo, each of us recited a poem or sang a song in exchange for her present.
Even so, some of my friends’ families maintained the legend of the magical man. The year before, my neighbor Sonya brought out a brand-new tea set for dolls, an early gift for New Year’s, when I went to her apartment to play. Sonya was in my class and lived above my grandparent’s apartment with her mother and grandmother. Her father died when we were young. My other friends considered Sonya a bit of a dork. She had perfectly even handwriting, went home early to do her homework, her mother hugged and kissed her way too often and she wore Russian-style white ribbons in her hair. When fresh snow fell, she arrived at school by sled pulled by her grandmother. My friends and I were probably envious because none of our “cool” parents would ever do that for us. We walked to school. If we wanted to go sledding after class, we pulled our sleds to the park and up the hill by ourselves. What we wouldn’t have given to have someone pull our sleds through the fluffy white snow before it melted or got soiled with car oil and city dirt!
I asked Sonya how she’d gotten her tea set, an object difficult to obtain in our communist country, where consumer products often disappeared before they were even released in shops. “Easy,” she said, cheerful. “Every year I write a letter to Grandfather Frost and tell him what I want for the holiday.”
We were sitting on the floor in her living room, her dolls in a perfect circle around us, with a tray of open-faced cheese and butter sandwiches her grandmother had placed next to us.
“I put it in our mailbox and my mom gets it for me.”
“That’s all?” I said.
Sonya nodded, biting into one of the sandwiches. It had a sprig of parsley on the top. “I write I was a good girl and things like that. Then she puts it under the tree and says it’s from Grandfather Frost.”
In previous years, Sonya had asked for a doll that closed its eyes when it “slept,” ice skates and who knows what else. That year, she’d requested the tea set for dolls and her mother and grandmother bought it, not an easy task as one had to wait in the infamously long Perestroika lines and likely push others out of the way or bribe a salesperson to obtain it. My parents would never wait in such lines as they considered it bourgeois to acquire needless consumer goods. Plus, I was sure they thought a tea set for dolls would teach me the wrong values. They wanted me to be strong and creative, not a girlie girl whose main occupation is serving tea to her family.
“But haven’t they explained to you that there is no Santa?” I said.
“Of course,” Sonya said. She opened the tea set and started arranging the tiny colorful cups and saucers and spoons.
“And they don’t think you are silly for writing the letters?” I was afraid if I did something like that, my father would make fun of me.
Confused, Sonya shook her head.
That same evening a year ago, I wrote my very own letter to Grandfather Frost. “Dear Grandfather Frost,” I wrote. “I have been a very good girl all year. I did my homework and got good grades. Could you, please, bring me a tea set for dolls?”
I’m not sure why I asked for that. I had exactly one doll, a poorly made Romanian imitation Barbie whose joints were broken and who had no clothes. I rarely played with it. If I played with anyone, it was with Uggo, a squished disheveled creature with long legs my mother helped me sew from fabric scraps but Uggo would never attend tea parties. He was way too cool.
At the time, my obsession was drawing horses. I practiced at the wee hours of the night and during weekend afternoons when my parents and younger brother were asleep. But none of my horses looked right—their legs were either too thin or too thick. Why didn’t I ask for a book of horse drawings or a calendar with horse photographs or new pencils?
Perhaps I thought a tea set for dolls was more girly and normal and that my parents would like me better. On my way to school the next morning, I dropped my letter to Grandfather Frost in our family’s mailbox in the building’s foyer.
That evening, my father called me to the living room. My letter lay open on the coffee table.
“I found this in our mailbox,” he said. He brushed the shaggy hair from his eyes. His large brown eyes sparkled with amusement.
“My letter to Santa,” I said.
I stared at a tangerine rind on the table.
“Your mother and I buy the gifts and give them to you,” he said, his tone patient and curious. “You know that.”
I nodded.
“So what were you thinking?” my father said.
I couldn’t tell him I hadn’t been really thinking because a whole other conversation about logic and the importance of thinking would ensue.
“Sonya did it and she got what she wanted,” I said, picking up the tangerine rinds and ripping them into smaller pieces. “I wanted to try the same.”
“You were just following what others were doing?” My father wanted me to think and explain myself. He waited. I knew he had incredible amounts of patience. Once, as a teenager, he’d watched a drop of sweat emerge from his skin. That was how patient he was.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I just wanted to see what would happen.”
“You were testing us?” He rubbed his George Harrison-inspired moustache.
“No,” I said, confused. I really wasn’t sure why I had done it. “I just thought it would be fun.”
“Is it fun to engage in lies?” he asked, his eyebrows rising, his long bangs falling into his eyes. “Do you want us to lie to you? To pretend?”
On the verge of tears, I sank deeper into the sofa. I didn’t know. I wanted the magic. The magic of normality.
“If you have something to tell us, do it directly,” he said. “Don’t hide behind falsities.”
My parents had grown up in a regime that operated on hypocrisy. It was the only way to survive. In public, everyone pretended communism was wonderful. In private, one saw it for what it was—a broken, corrupt, often oppressive system. Or at least that was what their jean-wearing shaggy-haired friends said at my parents’ parties. I suspect my father insisted on honesty because he was sick of all the lies. He was an idealist. Maybe he thought if he didn’t pretend or lie and if he taught me to do the same, my life and—perhaps?—our society would eventually be better.
I felt embarrassed. I hadn’t been true to myself, the value my parents had emphasized more than anything. I had taken something external—someone else’s dream—and forced it on my family. I should have known that it wouldn’t work. Your values had to come from you, from who you were on the inside—your passion, your talent, your soul. I should have asked for a book of horses or new drawing pencils. I didn’t care about the stupid tea set—nobody in my family even drank tea! We were a four-espressos-a-day family, including my grandparents.
My father then pointed out my orthographic errors, places where I had written “a” instead of “o” or had mixed voiceless and voiced consonants.
This had all happened a year ago.
Now, I stared at the gift left for me at our doorstep. My mind ran through the possibilities of who could have given it to me. It wasn’t my parents. It wasn’t their style—obviously. Plus, they usually gave things like books or watercolor sets, wrapped in white paper and decorated with dehydrated leaves and flowers or with ribbons made of leftover yarn. The gift wasn’t from my grandparents either. With them, everything came in twos—one for me and one for my brother—even birthday gifts. True socialists, not wanting either of us to feel left out, were incapable of giving to one and not to the other. Plus, we’d see them the next day, January 1, and their gifts for us would be under their daintily decorated Christmas tree that stood inside a Japanese porcelain vase the same height as me. Family friends, my aunt and anyone else I could think of would have put both mine and my brother’s names on the label.
Was it possible, then, that Grandfather Frost did exist?
I knew the world was a globe that turned on its axis. I knew that there was a time difference between the countries. That our country was tiny and surrounded by other (equally insignificant) tiny countries. So, scientifically speaking, Grandfather Frost could have dropped off all the gifts around midnight in Bulgaria, then gone on to the next country, where it would still be midnight. Okay—it would definitely take a very energetic man but Grandfather Frost had helpers like the Snow Maiden and the reindeers and they were young and fast. So, together—maybe?—they could do it?
I was leaning against the door sill, thinking this through, when my father approached. “Little mousey, who was it?” he said, gently putting his arm around my shoulder.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the box. “It has my name on it.”
His eyebrows raised in puzzlement. He stepped into the landing, looked up and down the staircase. Then, he picked up the box.
“Dad, I was thinking…” I said. I took a deep breath. “Since the world rotates and, also, there is time difference between the countries… maybe Grandfather Frost actually could have enough time to drop off gifts in all countries of the world at exactly midnight…” I followed him into the apartment. “And maybe I got a gift because I was good and my brother wasn’t. Remember how he ran away from kindergarten and both teachers had to go look for him in the courtyard and called you? He made mom really mad and all the kindergarten teachers, too. And he broke his glasses on purpose! He was naughty and I was good. Maybe that’s why there’s only a gift for me.” I said all this fast, wanting to get it out before the “reasoning” began and, by the end of my speech, I was out of breath.
My father, standing in the foyer, listened, smiling. I think he liked to see my thought process. He patted me on the head. “Little mousey, it’s probably the women from the neighborhood’s committee.” He locked the door and handed me the gift. “They came a few weeks ago asking if any girls lived here.”
The women’s committee. I sighed.
I didn’t know what a committee was, exactly, but I knew it was a dreaded, ideologically tendentious thing to be avoided. In the 19th-century, our national hero, Vassil Levsky, had been in a revolutionary committee to overthrow the Ottomans who had yoked our country when he got captured and hanged. My parents and my friends’ parents often had to stay late at work for required communist committee meetings, which meant they got home late, exhausted and cranky. The women’s committee sounded innocuous enough but my grandmother was a member of one of those and even at the age of eight, I had gathered that this “committee” seemed to be the opposite of promoting women’s rights; they focused on how to be more feminine, how to keep the family together, how to be a better wife, a graceful hostess, and so on.
This was a tainted gift.
My father and I returned to the living room. The president was now speaking about the prosperity of our great nation, about all of us working together to build socialism, about solidarity. I placed the gift on the couch. I didn’t want it. What did these committee women know about me?
“Aren’t you going to open it?” my father said, unwrapping a box of rose-flavored Turkish delight that we used as bets in backgammon. He placed ten translucent pink cubes in front of me, glamorous and delicate, perfectly aligned like the snowflake-ballerinas in the Nutcracker. He put another ten in front of himself, ready to play.
I shrugged and opened the gift. It was a tea set for dolls with little cups and saucers and tiny spoons. I must have made a face because my father said, “Didn’t you want something like that last year?” He winked at me.
I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me. I just knew I would never play with the set.
The president wished the nation a happy New Year and the giant clock on the screen chimed midnight. The broadcast switched back to the variety show. Colorful confetti fell onto the host, the actors and the performers. They kissed and hugged and clinked champagne glasses. Then they burst into a cheesy pop song. My mother came in with a plate of unevenly cut carrots and apples—our dessert. We wished each other a happy new year.
My father and I each rolled a die to see who would play first. He clasped his and blew on it—for good luck, he said, a superstition. So much for science. We’d open our real gifts, the ones we made for each other in the morning, when my brother woke up.
The next morning, January 1, my father woke me early. My room was warm—the centralized heating worked well in our socialist apartment—and very bright. I had no curtains and my windows were bare, exposing me to the sun and open sky.
“Little mousey,” my father whispered. “I want to show you something.” He picked me up, tickling me with his moustache and carried me to the window.
Our building, at seven stories high, was the highest in the neighborhood. We lived on the fifth floor and I had a view of the entire neighborhood.
Outside, fresh, fluffy snow covered everything. It sparkled and glittered in the sun, on top of tree branches, on the sides of the uneven bricks of the fence, all over the courtyard floor, in the yard of the Swiss ambassador’s residence across from us and even in my school’s empty courtyard.
Soon, people would wake up from their holiday hangovers and walk and drive over it, turning the pristine snow into muddy slush. But, at that moment, it was perfect.
My father had taught me that the calendar dates were artificial creations, that they did not correspond to anything in the natural world, such as the seasons. I knew that New Year’s Day was an arbitrary date, yet it seemed that all of nature had come together to celebrate the most exciting, most important holiday, in this beautiful, magical way.
This was the gift I had been hoping for without knowing it.
“Let’s go for a walk in the park now before everyone gets up,” my father said. “It’s early, I’m sure we’ll see deer and bunnies.”
He helped me put on my warm sweater and jacket and we slipped out.
