Winter Lace

The festive exhibition “Winter Lace”, dedicated to the New Year and Christmas, is open since December 8 in the Ring gallery of the 2nd floor.

The most magical and fabulous time of the year is approaching. The time of frosty patterns on glass, trees and houses shrouded and decorated with snow. It's time for cozy lace things and a joint evening reading of poetry and prose stories on the theme of winter holidays. The book exhibition presents a number of publications and visual documents from the collection of the National Library of Belarus, which will introduce you to the origins of the Christmas holidays and help you feel the unusual atmosphere of winter days.

The exhibition consists of several sections and tells about the history of national holidays, New Year and Christmas traditions and related signs and beliefs. Its sections “Christmas in Belarus” and “Christmas in the World” open, in which special attention is paid to the tradition of celebrating New Year and Christmas by our ancestors, as well as the peculiarities of celebrations in other countries of the world.

The central place is given to the section “Father Frost Workshop” where you can learn how to decorate an apartment, arrange gifts for relatives and friends in an original way, make masks, souvenirs and Christmas decorations. The advice of professional decorators and screenwriters will help to set the table stylishly and organize an unforgettable holiday full of fun, surprises and contests.

It has long been a tradition to give children books at the beginning of the year that instill a love of nature, knowledge, teach friendship and respect for adults, and help them spend family evenings together. Separate sections “Christmas readings” and “Snow pages of winter fairy tales” are devoted to this, which feature fairy tales and short stories by H. Andersen, N. Gogol, N. Nekrasov, A. Chekhov, A. Ostrovsky, Ya. Kolas, S. Marshak, etc. Numerous collections of ABC books, anthologies specially contain the best poems, fairy tales, stories by famous writers about winter and the New Year. Warm colourful illustrations by the Belarusian artist Rita Timokhova appear from the pages of the collection “A Gift from Father Frost”.

Among the features of the exhibition are the winter issues of one of the first literary magazines for children “A Small Toy” (XIX century), a number of calendar books "All year round” and "Children's calendar". These are annual children's literary and artistic collections, which were welcome New Year's gifts for Soviet children. The books are decorated with lots of drawings and full-format color stickers. Poems and fairy tales, homemade crafts and short stories, board games, essays about significant dates, events and outstanding people were printed there.

We invite you to visit the exhibition and join the festive book reading to start the New Year with good books.

The exhibition runs until January 14, 2024.
The completion date can be changed.

The opening hours of the exhibition correspond to the Library opening hours.
Admission is by a library card or by the social and cultural center ticket.

The books presented at the exhibition can be ordered through the E-catalogue of the National Library of Belarus.

For more info: (+375 17) 293 29 80.

The material is provided by the Department of gallery and exhibition activities.