Wesołych Świąt

Tonight a few friends will be coming over to celebrate Wigilia – Polish Christmas Eve.

Since I was a kid, my family’s Christmas celebration lasted about four days. It would always start on my birthday, December 22nd. At some point in the afternoon on that day, my babci (grandmother) would begin making the filling for pierogi – our traditional Wigilia meal. It’s not the traditional Polish meal, but it was ours. Poles don’t eat meat on Christmas Eve, but my mother hates fish (which is traditional) so pierogi, and only peirogi, it was – trust: you can positively make a meal of these fried in butter (I have on so many occasions…)

She’d start with the onions. So many onions that simply being in the house would make you weep. Our clothes reeked of sauteed onions for days. Then she’d boil the saurkraut (after wringing the beJesus out of it to remove all traces of saur), and start the potatoes (adding four hundred pounds of cream cheese when they were finished) and by dinner time she’d have a giant pan of cabbage and a huge bowl of potatoes waiting to begin the next stage in pieorgi prep.

At this point it’d be dinner time, and I always wanted pizza for my birthday dinner, so we ate it. I’d get to pick one gift from under the tree to open and my babci would light candles on a yellow cake with chocolate frosting she always made because it, too, was my favorite. The best part of birthdays growing up of course is watching your brothers and sister pout that you are getting all the attention and know they can’t do a single thing about it. My cake!

We’d finish eating then my grandmother would move onto the next stage: rolling the filling into small oblongs. I hated this part so always made myself scarce. I’d sit in the living room watching Christmas movies on TV and staring into the blue and silver Christmas tree my mom put up every year. (Always blue and silver: L says now it must have been our super secret Jewish heritage showing through…)

Trimming was never really a fun task: it was always a stressful practice in fashioning the tree to look exactly like it looked the year before – without breaking anything. If I’d had a dime every time my mom yelled Be careful! at us I’d never have to work again. In the end, she’d do most of it and we’d just watch the mess grow and wan, grow and wan, as my mom decorated our inevitably crooked Christmas Tree mis en place, picking things up as she went. By the time she was finished the glass Wesołych Świąt ball, the last ball to be hung, took its rightful place dead-center of the tree, so that it was the first ball you’d see upon entering the room and laying eyes on the tree.

By the time my babci was done, she’d have two cookie sheets stacked three levels high filled with little cabbage and potato oblongs, about 150 delicious fillings.

The next day, the 23rd, would be dough day. Anyone who has ever tried to make pierogi dough knows it is a fragile business of hit or miss. You want to make it so thin you can see the world right through it. But you need to make it thick enough not to split during the boil. It’s almost impossible, which is why so many of us agree it is okay to love pierogi dough that’s too thick – because if you waited all your life for the perfect pierogi, you’d die without ever having eaten one – unless you were me and had my babci, who of course, made them perfect every year, even when her arthritis was raging (I’ve made them three times in my life: the first I was charmed and they came out absolutely perfectly. The other two times: rubbery, and strange).

The dough was a day-long process of gerunds (kneading, loving, warming, rolling, cutting, tucking, pinching, boiling, drying, eating (only the broken ones!), and refrigerating) that didn’t end until the feet were so sore and swollen you couldn’t bear to stand on them anymore, and several hundred pierogi lay tightly in their casserole dishes.

The next day of course was Wigilia. We’d eat around 6 o’clock then retire to the living room to tear through presents. From then until about 11pm, we’d play with our gifts and chat and watch television, then prepare for midnight mass-one of my favorites. It was usually very cold and almost always snowy, so that when the benediction began and the incense was wafted about the parishioners, it was inevitable that at least one person, clad in heavy winter wool armor, would faint. Upon entering the church we used to try to pick out the likely fainters, and were pleased to be correct so many times.

When we got home, my mother and I would sit on the couch under covers drinking hot chocolate and watching It’s a Wonderful Life. I would promptly fall asleep, occasionally waking to find a look of longing on my mother’s face, accompanied by a strange grin and squint as she watched George finally see how important he really was to everyone, how much they all loved him and more: how much he loved them all.

And finally, day four would arrive: day of sloth. We’d sit around watching cable, offering drinks and snacks to some not-so-distant-yet-not-so-close-either relatives who made their yearly visits to us. And at night, we’d go to the movies, like everyone else.

This year, no pierogi, but lasagna and salad. No midnight mass, but an early, evening vigil. No not-so-distant relatives, but lots and lots of sloth and if L feels better (she’s so sick, still!) then maybe I will force her to see National Treasure with me.

Wesołych Świąt everyone: look sweetly upon your pasts, and gratefully on your presents. Thanks for reading.

Tags: Christmas Eve, Wesołych Świąt, Wigilia