What do Belarusian children want the most for New Year?
It is easy to understand the social situation in the country by the letters of the children to the Father Frost.
When things are really bad the children ask for simple things - dear Father Frost, please bring us a chocolate, a cookie and some butter. We read letters like this... They write about everything... I wish mom wouldn't be angry with me, I wish Dad wouldn't get to prison", - says director of the mass culture department of the unitary enterprise "City Parks" Lidziya Vezhnavets.
Each year, she reads thousands of children's letters to the Father Frost. She says that some of them are hard to talk about...
Lidziya Vezhnavets: "The children are very sincere in their letters to the Father Frost. When an adult person feels bad, he can go to the church and pray... And what are the children supposed to do? So they come to the Father Frost. However, we try to keep such letters in secret".
The Russian Father Frost gets three hundred thousand letters a year! Euroradio managed to call his residence also.
"Modern kids. This year, many of them want to have censor cell phones, laptops, netbooks, I-pods, I-pads, all kinds of this stuff...", - says an employee of the Father Frost's House which is located in Veliki Ustyug.
Belarusian kids also ask for laptops, pads, new cell-phones.
Children's letters may be divided into practical, kind-hearted and sad ones, people from the Father Frost's residence say. Sometimes the kids write about their families, ask to make their parents stop quarrelling, ask for peaceful life, for a father to get back to the family... There are also many kind-hearted letters, in which the kids care not only about themselves but about their parents as well.
Father Frost's residence: "A boy wrote: Dear Father Frost, I really want to get a magic table-cloth as a present as I feel pity for my Mom - she comes from work very tired and then she stands beside the oven cooking for the whole family".
Another boy wrote that he wanted to get a treasure detector to spend all treasures that he would find for renovation of churches.
However, the most frequent wish is ... ordinary toys! Girls ask for dolls, houses, jewellery, children's cosmetics. As for boys...
"Usually, they ask for something military-like... A machine gun or a rifle... A boy came to the Father Frost recently and got a rifle as a gift," - says Lidziya Vezhnavets.
So I ask whether Russian kids ask for weapons. They say - very few. Usually, they ask for helicopters with remote control and upgraded automobiles.
It is interesting that not only kids write to the Father Frost - adults do it as well! Moreover, there are many letters from adults! Guys who serve in the military ask for sweets and condensed milk, students ask for successful examination session... Women ask to find "the one", and young couples ask for children.
Lidziya Vezhnavets: "It was a whole epidemia recently... About 10 young couples wrote to the Father Frost asking to help them to give birth to a baby for some reason... I hope they succeeded".
As for Belarusian men, they ask nothing from the Father Frost. Only the lonely ones after 50 write…
"Usually, they ask to find the one... They don't ask for anything material. Write things like - help me, Father Frost, to find the only beloved and dear one," - says Mrs. Vezhnavets.
Also... everyone asks for snow this year!
