New Year's story

But over time, Frost changed. Severe, walking the earth in the company of the Sun and Wind and freezing the men he met along the way to death (in the Belarusian fairy tale “Frost, Sun and Wind”), he gradually turns from a formidable man into a fair and kind grandfather.

“The ancient fortified cities of the Southern Urals were called Santa Claus. "Santa Claus" can be translated from Latin as "sacred, closed place" from "sanctus" – "sacred, inviolable, inviolable", "clausum" – "closed locked place, lock, bolt." And Santa Claus (Father Frost) rides a sleigh and lives at the North Pole. The sleigh is older than the wheeled cart; they were known to the peoples of not only northern but also southern countries. Most likely, sleighs were born in the polar regions and served as the main means of transportation in winter. In off-road areas in the Far North, and in some places in Siberia, sleighs often replaced wheeled vehicles in the summer. In rural areas of those countries where the winter is snowy, sleighs retain their importance; among the peoples of the Far North they still serve as the main means of transportation. Father Frost with the Snow Maiden in a sleigh drawn by four reindeer, who brings gifts to children, was obviously a prototype of the northern peoples, where there is frost, taiga and deer, and who came in sleighs to Europe with their goods. Then this image was transformed into the image of St. Nicholas. Ancient Indo-Europeans in winter on sleighs drawn by reindeer could travel long distances through the snow, exchanging their goods (“to-var” from the name of the ancient Var), where they “cooked” metal products – the region of the Southern Urals, and could travel to the North Pole region along Ural mountains.

The ancient Indian legends – the Vedas – mention the ancient architecture of the ancient Indo-Europeans. People of the “Vedic” era lived in small round or oval (egg-shaped) villages, consisting of buildings with hemispherical and conical roofs, the village was surrounded by a fence and observation towers, two wide streets intersecting at right angles divided the village into four parts and ended with four gates. This description fully corresponds to most of the fortresses of the archaeological culture of Santashty-Arkaim, which currently numbers 29 archaeologically proven ancient settlement cities in the Southern Urals.

Linguistic evidence shows that in ancient times alphabets were written from right to left. And the word “Meru” written backwards will give “Urem”, which resembles the word “Ural”. In the Devanagari script (“used in the heavenly city”), in which such common Indian languages as Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, etc. are written, which goes back to the Brahmi script, words are written from left to right, connecting letters along the upper horizontal, vowels after consonants are designated by special signs, the sound “a” is not indicated at all” (Tikhomirov A.E., Meru – Ural Mountains? “LitRes”, Moscow, 2023, p. 6).

The Snow Maiden is a unique attribute of the image of Father Frost. None of its younger or foreign brethren have such lovely escorts. The image of the Snow Maiden is a symbol of frozen waters. This girl, dressed only in white clothes, reflects popular ideas about youth and moral beauty. No other color is allowed in traditional symbolism. Her headdress is an eight-rayed crown embroidered with silver and pearls. The modern costume of the Snow Maiden most often corresponds to the historical description. Violations of the color scheme are extremely rare and, as a rule, are justified by the inability to make the “correct” suit. In the repertoire of storytellers, the tale of the Snow Maiden, known only in Russian folklore, is usually combined with other plots. One of the versions of the fairy tale, in which the Snow Maiden melts from the sun's rays, was creatively developed by A.N. Ostrovsky in the fairy tale play of the same name, which formed the basis of the opera by N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov "The Snow Maiden".