New Year’s in Tbilisi

New Year’s is huge here.

Georgians celebrate Orthodox Christmas on January 7, so the New Year’s is the first in the string of holidays. The Old New Year is celebrated as well on January 13, a good remnant of the secular Soviet tradition.

To be sure, the city is already dressed up and elaborately lit up (I’ll take pictures later) so those who observe Christmas on December 25 will feel festive as well, but it is not widely celebrated.

Since I’m here temporarily I didn’t plan to decorate my rented apartment if it were just me. But my niece is visiting and my son will be coming right before the New Year’s so we decided to do something with low environmental impact.

I bought a small live tree in a pot for 50 lari ($19). The plan is to put it into ground in the spring so that when I leave there will be a Lana’s tree in Tbilisi. I’ve planted a lot of trees in my life, so it will be a good legacy. Maybe I should start doing it in every country I visit, plant a local tree.

This one is a little lopsided but it was the right size and the best of the two my favorite plant store had. I fell in love like you would with a slightly imperfect thing. And who knows, maybe it will even out when it grows.

And yesterday we went out to the flea market and bought decorations for it. Everything except for the lights is used, and the lights will be donated later. Oh, and the self-sticking crafts paper to decorate the pot is new as well. But we were not able to find anything like that in the flea market. Total cost of all decorations - 20 lari ($7.5), including the new lights and sparkling paper for 6 lari.

We also got a small artisan-made Georgian New Year’s tree made out of curled thin wood strings, for the dinner table.

When we got home, we immediately started to decorate the tree together. Just like in many families, decorating the New Year’s tree is a bonding tradition for us and I longed for my son to be here while doing it. It was a little challenging to offset the tree’s lopsidedness but I think we’ve achieved it. What do you think?

When we were done, I said, just like in my childhood,

“One, two, three!

Lights up on the tree!”

And plugged in the lights.

Magic!