The charms of Ukrainian winter holidays

On December 7, 2024, at 12:00, an on-site meeting of the Social Sciences Department of the “Via scientorum” was held at the NGO “Special Children”. The event was held in a mixed format: in person at the premises of the NGO “Special Children” and online on the ZOOM platform.

After the full-scale invasion, many children with special needs were forced to seek refuge abroad. And today, the security situation does not allow most to return home. There are children with disabilities who live in Odesa. We wanted to organize a holiday for those who are there and those who are thousands of kilometers away. Therefore, a holiday was organized in a mixed format – in person and online.

Children and young people, as well as their parents, attended an exciting interactive lecture-presentation “The Magic of Ukrainian Winter Holidays” by the candidate of historical sciences, associate professor, scientific director of the group of the Department of Social Sciences, Tetyana Leonidivna Podkupko. The participants demonstrated the acquired knowledge when they took part in a thematic quiz on the Kahut platform. The head of the group, a second-year student, 8th group of the Medical Faculty, Karina Voloshyna, actively helped the participants join the quiz and help them understand the rules of the games.

Riddles, quizzes, quests, competitions, humorous fortune-telling – did not leave indifferent all those present both in person and virtually. Together they wrote a fairy tale-prediction: each wrote a sentence on a sheet of paper, then folded it, passed it to another. And so each added one sentence. Since those present today were magicians, the text of the fairy tale turned out to be a logically constructed story with a happy ending: “Everything will be fine.” The magic of the winter holidays worked wonderfully!

Today, we managed to organize an amazing holiday for children and youth with special needs at the international level, helping to feel the magical mood of Ukrainian traditional winter celebrations. Both in Odesa and in Romania, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Canada, and the USA, despite the distance and time difference, all participants plunged into the whirlpool of fabulous inspiration of the New Year and Christmas holidays!

Tetyana Leonidivna Podkupko,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Social Sciences
of Odesa National Medical University.