Ded Moroz

Snow lies heavy on the spruces, and somewhere in the dark of the forest a tree splits with a sound like a gunshot. That crack is the old sign of him. When the sap freezes and the trunks burst in the night cold, the villages of northern Russia once said that the frost grandfather had passed through, tapping the wood with his staff to learn how hard he could bite. He left no tracks. He left only the cold, and the cold was enough.

Ded Moroz is the Russian winter given a face and a temper. His name means simply Grandfather Frost, or Old Man Frost, and for most of his long life he was nobody’s friend. Before he carried a sack of presents he carried only the season itself, and the season in that part of the world is a thing that can kill a traveler between one village and the next. He is the personification of the deep cold, and the people who first spoke of him knew exactly what the cold could do.

In his oldest form he is called Morozko, and the stories about him are not gentle. He walks the frozen woods as an old man in a long coat, his white beard stiff with ice, and where he steps the air drops colder. He moves between the black trunks and knocks on each one, and the knocking is the frost driving into the grain until the wood groans and cracks. This is the work he exists to do. Winter is not a mood to him. It is a duty.

The tale that fixed him in the Russian imagination was collected by Alexander Afanasyev in the great gathering of Russian folk tales he published across the 1850s and 1860s. A man has a daughter and a stepdaughter, and the second wife hates the stepdaughter the way such wives always do in these stories. She orders the husband to take the girl out into the forest in the dead of winter and leave her there. He obeys. He sets her down under a fir tree in the snow and drives the sledge home, and the girl sits alone in the dark with the cold closing on her. Morozko comes crackling through the branches above her and leans close to ask whether she is warm enough. Each time he asks, the air around her grows colder. Each time, the freezing girl answers him kindly: warm enough, grandfather, warm enough. Her courtesy holds even as the frost reaches for her throat. So he spares her. He wraps her in furs, fills a chest with jewels, and sends her home rich. The stepmother, delighted, sends her own daughter out to the same tree to collect the same reward. That girl snaps at Morozko, complains, curses the cold and the old man both. He freezes her where she sits.

That is the whole of him, and it is worth saying plainly. He is winter, and winter kills. But winter also keeps. The same frost that murders the careless traveler lays a thick blanket of snow over the wheat and shields the buried seed through the months when nothing can grow, so the country survives to plant again. The oldest layer of belief held both halves of him at once, and the people who left him offerings of kutya, a porridge of honey and grain, were not thanking a kindly old man. They were asking a dangerous one to spare the garden.

The shape he wears now took form slowly, much of it across the nineteenth century, when writers and playwrights began to soften him. He stands tall, an old man with a flowing white beard reaching well down his chest. He wears a fur coat to the heel, sometimes red and sometimes a deep blue stitched with frost-white patterns, a round fur hat, and valenki, the heavy felt boots of the Russian winter. He carries a long staff, and the staff is not decoration; a touch of it can freeze a pond solid or root a man to the ground. He travels by troika, the three-horse sledge, and its bells are the sound of him arriving rather than the sound of him hunting.

He did not soften alone. Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The Snow Maiden, and the opera Rimsky-Korsakov drew from it, gave him a child of sorts. Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, is a girl made of snow who became his granddaughter and his companion. She travels with him still, in a pale blue coat, and she carries the season’s other truth, because a girl made of snow cannot survive the spring.

The new Soviet state had no use for him at first. Christmas was condemned as bourgeois and religious, and in 1928 Ded Moroz was officially denounced as an ally of the priest and the kulak. He should have vanished. Instead, in 1935, the authorities decided a midwinter holiday stripped of its religion could still be useful, and they handed the festival to the New Year. Ded Moroz came back through that door, no longer a Christmas figure but the master of New Year’s Eve, slipping gifts beneath the tree while children slept. He was even given an address. The northern town of Veliky Ustyug was named his official home, and the letters began to arrive there by the million.

His powers are the powers of the season made personal. He commands the cold absolutely, can deepen it at will, can freeze water, breath, and blood, can raise the wind and thicken the falling snow. He can also reverse all of it, and that reversal is the gift: warmth, furs, a chest of treasure for those who earn it. What he cannot do is escape his own nature. He is bound to the year, and when the thaw comes his grip fails, the rivers move again, and Snegurochka melts away from his side. He is bound, too, to his own strange fairness. The freezing girl in the forest survives not by fighting him, which is impossible, but by speaking to him gently, because Morozko cannot bring himself to kill someone who meets the killing cold with courtesy. His judgement is his weakness. A kind word, held steady against the worst he can do, turns his hand every time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ded Moroz?

Ded Moroz, whose name means Grandfather Frost or Old Man Frost, is the Russian and Slavic personification of winter cold. In folklore he is a stern old man who walks the frozen forest, freezing those who are cruel or arrogant and rewarding those who are humble and kind. In his modern form he is the bringer of New Year gifts to children, the Slavic counterpart of Santa Claus.

What is the difference between Ded Moroz and Santa Claus?

Ded Moroz delivers gifts on New Year’s Eve rather than on Christmas, a result of Soviet-era policy that moved the midwinter holiday away from religion. He wears a heel-length fur coat that is often blue rather than red, carries a long magic staff, travels by troika sledge, and is accompanied by his granddaughter Snegurochka. His roots are also far older and harsher than Santa’s, lying in a pre-Christian spirit of the deadly winter frost.

What happens in the story of Morozko?

In the Russian fairy tale collected by Alexander Afanasyev, a cruel stepmother forces her husband to abandon his daughter in the winter forest. The frost spirit Morozko finds the girl and repeatedly asks if she is cold, growing colder with each question, but she answers him with patience and courtesy, so he spares her and rewards her with furs and jewels. When the stepmother sends her own rude daughter to win the same prize, the girl insults Morozko and he freezes her to death.

Who is Snegurochka?

Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, is the granddaughter and companion of Ded Moroz. She is a girl made of snow, and she travels with him in a pale blue coat as his helper during the winter season. Her character was shaped largely by Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The Snow Maiden and Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, and in the legend she cannot survive the warmth of spring.

Why was Ded Moroz banned in the Soviet Union?

After the Russian Revolution, Christmas was condemned as bourgeois and religious, and in 1928 Ded Moroz was officially denounced as an ally of the priest and the kulak. The ban did not last. In 1935 the Soviet authorities revived the midwinter celebration as a secular New Year holiday, and Ded Moroz returned as its central figure, delivering gifts to children on New Year’s Eve.

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