The Drab Colors Squashing the Spirit

As a teenager, shopping with my mom one day, I saw a bolt of material with a beautiful splash of color among the sea of drab greys, dark browns, black, ink blue, and very dark olive. Wondering how that escaped the eyes of the communist censorship, I begged my poor mom to buy me 2 meters of it so I could have a new dress, a special treat for me since my parents were very poor and could not afford such things often. They were honest blue-collar workers, the proletariat that the regime talked about all the time and kept oppressed and hungry. I wanted my aunt Stela to make me a short sleeve dress out of the cheap polyester material sprinkled with red roses against a green and black background. I knew I would stick out like a sore thumb in a sea of drab colors, but it made me happy just looking at it.

I would often say to myself that, if I would ever afford beautiful and bright colors, my clothes would be happy hues, something the communist economy never offered to their trapped and impoverished “customers.”

Our school and work uniforms were dark grey, navy, black, ink blue, various shades of brown, and white shirts. Nothing fancy, just basic. Shoes were black, white, and brown with thick brown or black hose. Pants were discouraged in women unless they were working in factories. I wore black pants in winter as a child, to keep warm. Photographs show high waters when the same pair was worn two years in a row.

Finally I came to America and my eyes were overwhelmed with beautiful colors. Even though I could not afford anything, the fact that such beautiful fabrics, clothes, and colors existed, it made my heart dance with joy.

Years later, I discovered Lilly Pulitzer with its array of greens, blues, pinks, beiges, and white. It had not yet morphed into the mixture of designs and dazzling colors of today - they stand out at airports among the sea of black clothes as if everyone is going to a funeral.

Strangely, in the last four years, since the forced Covid lockdowns, everything around us began to change in the direction of the drab life we lived under communism. Everything became utilitarian, small, crowded, plain, and uniform.

It started with the selection of clothes, towels, in department store offerings and in car colors. They all looked the same as if they had used the same designers and manufacturers – a lot of greys, blacks, beiges, browns, navy, olive greens, and white. A few colors here and there but nothing like it had been.

Cars became indistinguishable on the road, the same shades of grey, silver, black, beige, and white. I had a hard time finding a new car in red or a beautiful blue. It took me a year and a half to find my red SUV.

Then I noticed that all fast food restaurants started changing their outdoor appearance as if a Bauhaus conference had taken place and all have decided that they would go with the same drab and depressing interior and exterior décor – shades of grey, brown, black, and beige.

The big arches were gone, the big windows were gone, and so were the playgrounds which my children loved even though the food was never great. It was a part of Americana that disappeared and was replaced by Bauhaus drabness. Colors that made the buildings look happy and inviting, disappeared. Some even looked like a prison from the exterior. The only holdouts were the Mexican food restaurants which remained the same colorful and happy places.

The fast food and regular restaurants now look inside and out like the utilitarian Bauhaus architecture, not inviting, cozy places where you go not just for the food but for an atmosphere and a pleasant experience that pleases the visual senses.

Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius became a movement in early 20^th century Germany, featuring “straightforward and functional designs with simple geometric shapes, clean lines, and minimal embellishment, using basic materials like steel, concrete, and glass.”

This type of architecture was the basis of our lives in communism – simple and utilitarian, nothing fancy for the proletarian masses. Reinforced concrete high-rise apartments withstood a strong earthquake of 7.2 on Richter scale. It did not demolish such ugly buildings but broke pieces of it, dangling them like loose teeth.

Next time you go out to a fast-food restaurant, notice the simplicity and drabness of color, the smaller windows, or the windows that had been taken out and replaced by grey walls. And they all look alike, drab, ugly, uninviting, and prison-like. Who wants to eat in such an unhappy place? Perhaps that is the idea, driving the masses back to their own homes, ordering food and staying indoors, better controlled.

Brimming with Christmas Spirit

Wikipedia photo

I recently met a young couple giddy with the jubilant spirit of Christmas. It was a rare encounter as Christmas traditions are under assault and condemned on the altar of progressivism and Islam. He wore a red and green elf vest and a Santa hat over his regular clothes and a big smile of good cheer. His lovely wife had donned a beautiful red dress with sparkling tinsel on the left collar. He told me how much he enjoyed Christmas and decorating trees which he left up every year late into January, even past the Russian Orthodox Christmas on January 6.

We started talking and I told them about our Christmas celebration and our fir tree, thin and puny on branches and ornaments, but high on spirits. They listened politely but then I realized from the expression on their faces and the look in their eyes that neither one could relate to the description that followed.  They were millennial young and recently married.

I told them how we decorated the blue spruce with real candles, apples, cookies, and home-made shiny paper ornaments, with a few and rare Bohemian glass ornaments, and how we lit the tiny candles every night for a few minutes - they were clipped as far to the outside branches as possible to avoid catching the tree on fire. To mom’s exasperation, Daddy would nail the base of the tree stand to the parquet floor. A few oranges, apples, and cookies were hung on each branch with colorful string, and chocolate bonbons and plump raisins filled home-made cardboard tiny baskets decorated with red and green crepe paper.

Larger cities decorated a huge tree in the center of town with colorful lightbulbs and organized a winter carnival with rides on St. Nicholas Day, December 6. New Year’s Day was a secular holiday decreed so by the Communist party but Christmas was not really a holiday at all.

People who lived in villages stuck to tradition and celebrated Christmas. Priests opened the modest and very cold churches for services on Christmas Eve. I attended services with my aunt Leana who was a deacon and a cantor. Churches in the mountainous areas were more active so far away from the prying eyes of communists.   

Caroling, donations of food to people less fortunate, and having an extended family meal to celebrate Christmas was the highlight of our year.  During certain days, we went from house to house with elaborately prepared plates of food and baskets of goodies for those less fortunate, widowed, old, or sick.

Villagers learned to care for each other in good times and bad.  They bartered services and things they had in excess with other neighbors since money was so tight. People learned to adjust to their communist-imposed poverty in so many creative ways.

My parents, my secret Santa (Mos Craciun), would put a small food item by my pillow which I would find on Christmas morning – an unwrinkled apple, a fragrant orange from Israel, a green banana from Greece, or a bittersweet chocolate bar. Christmas was good for us kids because we were oblivious to our state in life. We had no idea how hard adults struggled to make ends meet.

How could I make this well-off American couple understand that Christmas was a gift of prayer and time to be with the extended family to share love and abundant food that was otherwise missing the rest of the year?

Nobody can comprehend that an entire nation can be held hostage for decades and suffer so much in a fight for survival every day to find food we take for granted here, bread, milk, butter, flour, sugar, rice, cooking oil, and needful things such as toilet paper, vitamins, and basic medicines. It is hard to believe when the shelves in America’s grocery stores are brimming with food.

As Oleg Atbashian said in his book, Hotel USSR, after he legally immigrated to the U.S., he cried when he saw the abundance surrounding him, not tears of happiness, mind you, but of anguish for all the unnecessary and cruel pain the proletariat endured for decades at the hands of communist autocrats who enjoyed making the population suffer for many generations through constant shortages of food, long lines, lack of basic necessities like hot water, heat, having to depend on bribes, black markets, kickbacks, and bartering to survive.

An artist, Atbashian entered an art supplies store in Manhattan and wrote, “Rows upon rows of shelves brimmed with products that catered to every artistic need. No gatekeeper was checking permissions, and no Artists Union card was required to make a purchase… After the first floor, I went to the second, and then to the third. And then I imagined how different my life could have been and broke down in tears.”

Americans are so unappreciative of and spoiled by their abundance created through the hard work of many past generations, that they have no idea how other people live or that life can be any other way but good. But this American knows better and my Christmas spirit will always grow inside our Christian home and in my heart.