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These quasi-religious holidays are a real mess if you really look at them. Christmas is a confusing stew of Baby Jesus, Santa Claus and pine trees. The beauty of it is that you can take one part out and it still works. You can have an all christian holiday without Santa, and you could probably leave out the tree, just throw up some decorations.
When I was growing up behind the good ole iron curtain we left the religion out, and it worked fine. By the time I was born the harsh days of communist era were already left behind. Religion was not persecuted, though not encouraged either, which coincidentally had us in sync with the very un-communist West.
At Christmas time we had a tree which we decorated not unlike it's done here. In December street vendors popped up all over Budapest selling Christmas ornaments. We also hang szaloncukor on the tree, a colorfully wrapped "parlour candy." The Idea was that you would slowly eat them off the tree, but they are not that good, so they became permanent ornaments to be reused year after year. Early on we also used to put actual Christmas candles on the tree. They had special clip-ons. Naturally it was a bit of a fire hazard. Then we upgraded to Russian made tree lights. They had big bulbs and if one went out, there went the whole string. They could also give you a mild electric shock. We also put sparklers on the tree.
It's funny how the same holiday develops different flavors and traditions in different places. For example, we always opened the gifts on Christmas Eve, never on the next morning. There was also a pre-Christmas holiday. Mikulás day is December 6. Traditionally the night before you would put your shoe or boot in the window, and the next morning you'd find goodies in them, mostly candy, nuts, tropical fruit. Eventually it turned into the custom of parents putting store bought red plastic boots, filled with said goodies, in the window. Part of the lore is the figure of Krumpusz, a goblin like creature, supposed to scare bad kids.
Ironically this extra holiday is the result of previously strong identification of Christmas with religion. December 24 was the day of baby Jesus, so St. Nick - Mikulás in this case - had to move to a different day. Then after the war, and the coming of the Communist era the bearded fat man developed a multiple personality disorder. On the night of December 6, unseen, he would leave small edible presents on your window sill, and then on the eve of the 24th in his full glory as "Télapó" (Father Christmas) he would deliver the real goods. A real mess, I know, but I never questioned any aspect of it growing up.
The traditional Hungarian Christmas meal is also completely different. It is usually fish soup, followed by fried carp filets, and finished off with beigli made with walnuts or poppy seeds. Around the holidays another popular dish is kocsonya, jellied pig feet, that actually is much better than it sounds.
These photos were next to each other in the bin and I have good reason to believe that they come from the same album, probably one once having belonged to a Russian immigrant.
This one looks innocuous enough at first glance: a group of women in dated clothes standing around on a warm day. They are holding placards. I don't recognize most of the faces, but then in the middle, slightly sideways there is the beard of Karl Marx. I've seen enough of it growing up to recognize it anywhere. On the back of the picture there is some Cyrillic writing and the date: May 1, 1956. The infamous year of the Hungarian anti-Russian uprising, and the subsequent bloody crackdown, but that didn't happen till that fall.
Two middle-aged women posing for the photographer, one wearing an odd shaped hat. In the background: a public building with a Lenin head.
This photo has no images of communist celebs, nor any note on the back, but it was among the others and it looks so much like a scene from a Russian village circa mid-twentieth century, that it is almost a cliché. It looks like a wedding - the woman in the middle, towards the back is wearing a veil.
This one is much older than the others. It's typical old studio portrait and could have been taken anywhere, but again there is Cyrillic writing on the back. There is a narrative or two somewhere, real or imagined, connecting all these photos together.
Like Atlantis into the ocean sunk the world of my childhood into history, washed over by the waves of free market capitalism. Yeah I know, no place ever stays the same, but the change that hit the Eastern Block was swifter than usual. I saw an interesting little German movie recently, Good Bye Lenin! It's set at the time right before and after the falling of the Berlin wall. The protagonist is a young man trying to keep the political changes secret from his sick mother, fearing that the shock would kill her. It's both funny and poignant.
I think a lot of people in the west seem to think of the former Eastern Europe in James Bond cliches: everything grey and drab. Naturally, like everything, it's more complex. People laughed, had fun, the sun shone. I had a happy childhood, especially the first seven years, but of course by the time I was born things were loosening up, Hungary was on its way to "Goulash Communism." It was my parent's generation who wore the the brunt of hard core communism. 
I think of them as a generation that was short-changed. Their childhood was occupied by World War II, their youth taken over by an optimistic fervor, just to be squashed by ruthless reality. Hungary was hardly a democratic country before the war. Both my parents were from the country, from families of peasants, small town trades people. They were probably the first ones in their families ever to go to college, and they got their unexpected chance of social mobility only because of the communist regime. 
I believe they believed that indeed "fényes szelek" (sparkling winds) were blowing, they believed with a naive enthusiasm that a better world was coming and they could build it, not unlike early christians, or the hippies of the 60's. What happened to them was the same thing that happened to throngs of idealist so many times before or since: their fervor was used and misused, co-opted. 
One of my favorite books of all times, one that I would take with me on deserted island, is Master and Margarita by the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. The premise of the book is that Satan arrives to Moscow at the hight of the communist era to hold his Walpurgis Night Ball there. From there it breaks out to multiple narrative strands following multiple characters as their narratives criss-cross each others. There is also a story-within the story about Pontius Pilate. The style of the novel is magic realist - something we expect to come from South American writers, not Russians. It is amazing to me how the novel folds together the satire of communist absurdities, a love story, fantasy, allegory. My favorite part is the deadpan portrayal of the society and culture to the smallest absurd details.
A great movie from and about the are is Jirí Menzel's Larks on a String. It was filmed in 1969, but was banned for a long time. In the US it had a very limited release in 1990, but it was shown in Hungary in the 1980's. Menzel is known to every film student for Closely Watched Trains, but unfortnately Larks... is impossible to get hold of even on VHS.
In the end, despite of the resentment and sadness, I can't help but feel a tinge of nostalgia for that lost world. Also, since then I learned that the absurd is integral part of all political systems.
(Photos from my family ablum.)
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