New Year in Armenia? Leave your door open
Have you ever considered leaving your door unlocked on New Year’s Eve so it’s always open for guests? Would you feel embarrassed if a visitor were turned away without a proper welcome?
You might argue that you have no obligation to welcome an uninvited guest, unless, of course, they’re coming down the chimney with a large sack of presents.
For Armenians, however, there are no unwelcome guests and no need for invitations or RSVPs. On New Year’s Eve and for seven days afterward, doors remain open as friends and relatives go from house to house to sample ishli kufta, khozi bud, and blinchiks—dishes that may look familiar but are invariably declared unique and impossible to replicate by their hosts.
The holidays aren’t always celebrated this way, but for people raised with such fixed routines and customs, any disruption of this cherished tradition can cause distress.
Sofya Petrosyan learned early on how holiday harmony can be disrupted when tradition is ruptured. In her family, New Year’s celebrations belonged squarely to the home, and doing it elsewhere felt like a violation of a well-established order. One year, a family trip meant to break routine instead exposed how deeply those expectations ran.
“Most of my family members are men, and they’ve always hated spending New Year’s away from home,” Sofya explains. During that trip, the men in her family “were all so miserable that it ruined the whole thing for the rest of us as well.”
In many Armenian households, hospitality isn’t simply encouraged, it’s almost a moral obligation. Closing one’s door to guests carries a sense of shame, so much so that during the first few days of the New Year, most families leave their doors unlocked altogether. Visitors are treated as sacred, and everyone must ensure they are well fed, impressed and entertained at the table, no matter the cost to the hosts.
“Welcoming guests is an interesting tradition, but it should never cross a certain boundary because of a sense of shame,” Sofya says. She believes that hospitality should not be an act of endurance, but something offered freely and not out of fear of judgment.
These holiday visitations come with many unspoken norms. They are never explicitly addressed, but they are strictly followed.
When Ani Khachatryan travels to her family’s village of Shaghat in Syunik to mark the holidays, the celebrations always start at her grandfather’s brother’s house, where her great-grandfather lived. It is customary to always begin at the house of the eldest man in the family.
“We would spend New Year’s Eve there with multiple families, but there would also be a table set at our house,” Ani says. “Since my uncle is the head of the village, many people would come to their house until January 6.”
Since guests were the priority, Ani and the other women in her family would huddle in the kitchen as the tables filled with colleagues and villagers they didn’t know.
“Whenever guests we didn’t know would visit, all of us would sit in the kitchen and gossip,” Ani explains. “It wasn’t shameful, we just preferred not to sit at the table. But whenever our relatives came, all of us would always gather around the table together.”
The separation, she adds, wasn’t a gendered one in her family. Her male cousins also avoided the table during those visits, not out of obligation, but choice.
Many holiday traditions don’t come with instructions, but they’re always followed, perhaps unconsciously, out of habit. One of them is the quiet hierarchy governing who visits whom first during the holidays.
In Anahit Gzryan’s family, that order has never been questioned. Because her father is the eldest sibling, his brothers and sisters always begin the holiday rounds at their home.
“It’s not like we won’t visit my uncle’s or my aunt’s house if they don’t come first—nothing like that,” she explains. “It has just always been this way, with them visiting us first, since my dad is the oldest. We’ve just stuck to it.”
These norms are often followed unconsciously. Even though they may go unnoticed, the unwillingness or inability to follow them can cause quite a stir, disturbing an order that has held for generations.
It’s like an annual ritual, each family following their own unique variation for decades without even realizing it.
These holiday visits aren’t limited to Armenia. Armenians carry certain cultural traditions with them wherever they relocate.
Shagane Mkhoyan, who recently returned to Armenia from Russia, recalls these celebrations with tenderness. She has always loved New Year’s and the way it’s celebrated.
“My Russian friends were fascinated by the tradition of visiting each other with such big families,” she recalls. “Eventually, I started inviting them over whenever guests came, since they enjoyed it as much as I did.”
Those who witness it for the first time are often left in awe, genuinely delighted.Others who expected a quiet celebration may experience mild terror, forced to spend days on end in rooms overflowing with people.
As January 6 arrives and Christmas is celebrated in Armenian households, everything slowly shifts back to normal.
The doors are locked again, the Christmas trees are tucked into their boxes and put away, and the holiday table grows smaller each day. The visits stop, and people return to their routines.
Guests, of course, remain welcome as they always are. Tables will still be set, chairs rearranged but the scale and urgency are different.
What sets the New Year apart is not the hospitality, but the way it briefly takes over everything. After a year of relative quiet, unspoken rules, inherited expectations, long-practiced traditions and unwritten rituals resurface all at once, reshaping daily life during the season.
