Holiday is coming!
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Holiday is coming!

December 31, 2024

The first New Year’s toys and carnival costumes in Norilsk were homemade.

#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The desire to have a New Year fun does not depend on time or place. The holiday came to everyone equally, even in those years when Norilsk residents had nothing to decorate their Christmas trees with.

From the memoirs of one of the first Norilsk residents, Zoya Nardina:

“I remember celebrating the New Year in 1937 in Norilsk. I was nine years old then, and I was a second-grade pupil of a small one-story school in the Old town. The tree was real, and the toys were homemade. We cut them out of paper. No New Year’s costumes. We were wearing white blouses and black sarafans with straps. We all wore pioneer ties. We put masks-glasses on our faces and tied them with a string. The teachers played the accordion and balalaika. And we danced in a circle around the Christmas tree and played. For participating in the games, Father Frost gave us candies – punch caramel without wrapping, the so-called ‘pillows’, and small rubber dolls”.

By the end of the 1940s, Norilsk had its own New Year’s industry. Every December, several enterprises at once temporarily retrained as Father Frost’s workshops. The furniture shop of the construction components plant assembled sets of Christmas tree decorations, the electrical shop made garlands, the brick and block factory blew and painted glass balls, and the chemical laboratory – star-tops and glass snow. Every year, specialists from the subsidiary farms department cut down and brought to the population for sale a thousand spruce and larch trees that grew in the vicinity of Norilsk. In the early 1950s, Christmas trees for children were put up in three Norilsk schools, in the settlements of Valyok and Cherez, and also in remote peripheral locations: the open-pit mine, the 3/6 mine, in Kayerkan and Nadezhda together with the settlement of Zapadny. Holidays for adults were held in the technical school, in DITR (The House of Engineers and Technical Workers), in the trade union club, and the main masquerade ball for young people was held in the large gym.

For the New Year, Norilsk residents were given a chance to buy scarce goods. In the 1950s, Norilsksnab organization sold additional products for pre-holiday trade: jam and honey, nuts and apples, egg powder and dried fruits, sausage and Murmansk herring, various pickles, cigarettes and yeast, as well as grape wines and rectified spirit.

As for the first New Year’s markets, they, as well as the main city tree, migrated as the city streets grew. The first New Year’s markets were in the Old town, on Octyabrskaya street, and in the new part of Norilsk – in store No. 11, which was on the corner of Sevastopolskaya and Monchegorskaya streets. In the 1960s, Christmas tree trade was organized in Kulttovary store – the future Cosmos, and gift departments – in Siyaniye, Severyanka, Tkany, in the Talnah department store.

Even within the memory of current Norilsk residents, the main New Year’s market of the 1970-1980s was located in the children’s store Severok. On New Year’s Eve, real miracles happened there. All the saleswomen turned into Snow Maidens, and the walls were painted with New Year’s scenes. And what illumination there was! The Promtorg trading enterprise artists, having paper, foam plastic and gouache at hand, managed to make a fairy tale. They dipped tundra snags and dried flowers into a strong salt infusion – and got a sparkling, frosty forest. It is not surprising that Norilsk residents still remember those New Year’s markets.

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Text: Svetlana Ferapontova, Photo: Olga Zaderyaka, Norilsk residents and Nornickel’s Polar Division’s archives

December 31, 2024

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