There are some places in Moscow which always make me think of Christmas, no matter what time of the year I happen to stumble upon them. The shopping window in the Old Arbat which you can see above is one of those places.

It is the shopping window of one of souvenir shops the street is filled with. The Old Arbat used to be the bohemian heart of Moscow, the place where all the poets of the Silver Age lived and worked, and where the kitchen in just about any flat could have been the very space where they living through their joys, disillusionments and depressions on one of the many posidelky (kitchen parties). Not much of the bohemian chic has survived the historical turmoil Russia has gone through since the time of Tsvetayeva and Akmatova, and the place is now mostly filled with tourists. This one shopping window, however, and the infallibly turning, delicate apparatus it displays, retain a spark of magic. I stopped by the place one gloomy afternoon last October, and this is what I saw:

I love Christmas. Any time of the year is right for some Christmas magic.

This is the first of a new series of film postcards. I also regularly send my readers sound postcards of interesting things I hear in Moscow: unusual instruments, street poets and  metro stations. If you’ve been with me for a while, you probably already know that I have a very special relationship with the Moscow metro: I photograph the ordinary metro stations and I write about things which happen to me there – and I spend a lot of time underground. If you like what I do here, please join me on facebook, instagram and bloglovin‘ – it might seem to be a small thing, but it’s very important to me!