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Rainy Holidays

Thursday 22 December 2011

We wake to a gray, foggy, and rainy morning, a day that promises only to compound the misery of trying to do anything in town. It’s the kind of day that one wants to stay inside, cuddle up,

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and watch the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker.

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It’s almost ninety minutes of dancing, with only limited, very sporadic narration, yet the Girl sits, fascinated. “When is the Sugar Plum Fairy coming?” she asks, over and over and over, with it often coming out as “Sugar Flum Pairy.”

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Yet it’s not all relaxing, even if two of the three of us is feeling a little less than 100%. With Christmas nearing, it’s time to get to work on the Wigilia dinner — the Christmas Eve food extravaganza. Tonight, it’s pierogi z kapustą i grzybami (dumplings with cabbage and mushrooms) and uszka z grzybami (smaller dumplings — “ears” — with mushrooms).

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We all have different jobs, with the Girl having the most fun and consequently making the biggest mess.

Late Afternoon Nap

Wednesday 21 December 2011

Naps at school have disappeared this year. It’s a straight-through-the-day affair for the Girl. Add to it the fact that the more academic portion of the day is in the afternoons this year, and it’s clear that some days, it’s all she can do to keep from falling asleep in the car during the short ride home.

Nap

“Tata, can I take a little nap when we get home?” she sometimes asks. “Sweetie, you need to take a short nap when we get home,” I occasionally suggest. Either way, the result is the same: she curls up on the living room couch and is asleep within moments.

These are the moments that I value the most. That’s not a sarcastic comment about the peace and quiet a nap brings. It’s a statement about the incredible miracle that occurs when someone trusts you so fully that she’ll let you guide her to a soft spot and know without asking that you’ll cover her up.

Magic

Tuesday 20 December 2011

Some days just seem filled with it.

Source of Taste

A little fire, a lot of smoke, and one ends up with peppercorn-covered, smoky tenderloin magic.

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A few twigs of evergreen and a sweet helper and one ends up with a charmed Christmas ornament, a mini-tree for the kitchen.

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And there’s always the magic of dancing.

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Two Deaths

Monday 19 December 2011

Kim Jong-il and Vaclav Havel died within days of each other, yet the legacies they leave behind couldn’t be more strikingly different from each other if a writer had planned it. Kim Jong-il lead a repressive authoritarian regime that routinely starved its citizens while lavishing luxury on its divine leader. Havel was instrumental in leading his country to freedom from just the kind of dictatorship that Kim Jong-il created. He suffered persecution in the form of constant government surveillance and sporadic prison sentences, yet his response was to write some of the most influence literature to come out of Central Europe.

The universe, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

Performance

Sunday 18 December 2011

What would a Polish Christmas season be without a gathering that included a “short artistic program” — a skit? It seems the urge to produce amateur dramatic performances leaches into the potatoes that sustain Poles because it’s simply everywhere.

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Yet the idea behind such performances are among the things that keep a culture alive for centuries. It’s the same creative impulse that leads to symphonies and epics.

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And in a situation like the one in which K and the other area Poles find themselves, in a different land with different traditions, such performances ensure that the legacy they leave to their children will have a significant element of beets, potatoes, consonant-laden words, and songs — a culture within a culture.

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Last year’s celebration is here.

Baking

Saturday 17 December 2011

Baking seems to me, a non-baker who stands at the periphery, like a mixture of science, art, and alchemy. One mixes liquids, solids, and heat to produce temptations and treats. It’s a balancing act, and being one who doesn’t like to follow recipes, it’s no wonder I don’t even attempt to bake.

K, however, bakes. She has a classic love-hate relationship with it, though. Despite living in the States for almost six years, she still hasn’t gotten used to the ingredients available here. The flour behaves a little differently; the cocoa generally available is hopelessly difficult to work with; the yeast and sodas have minds of their own.

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As a result, baking here requires more patience than usual. Why she continues to do it is a testament both to her Polish stubbornness and her good and giving soul.

Big Sister’s Birthday

Friday 16 December 2011

Our daughter is five today. The best present (for us all): the news that she’s a big sister.

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Preparing the Meat

Thursday 15 December 2011

When Dziadek was here a few years ago and built us a rural smoker, we expected we’d be using it much more often than we do. “Think of all the things we can smoke: turkey, chicken, pork tenderloin — all for great cold cuts that will be tastier and cheaper than anything we can buy.”

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It was a glorious plan. An idea that lacked only a couple of a few several steps to the dream of complete food cold cut self-sufficiency. Soon, though, we’d be raising and slaughtering our own swine, harvesting our own salt from the sea to mix with our homegrown onions and herbs.

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The business of life, though, got in the way.

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Still, the infrequency — Christmas and Easter — heightens the savoriness.

Eating

Wednesday 14 December 2011

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Pasta has always been a favorite for the Girl, but she’s particular about it: sauce of any sort is a no-no. “Bez sosu” is the common refrain pasta is on the stove. The result, of course, is rather sticky noodles,

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which can cause problems with long hair.

Scrabble

Tuesday 13 December 2011

We’ve been struggling to get the Girl speaking Polish on a regular basis. She’s resisted consistently until a recent trip to Poland: two weeks with Babcia, including a week with cousin S, and suddenly, she’s speaking Polish spontaneously — to her toys when she’s playing alone.

Games

And so we’ve reached a point at which the Girl can play Polish games, like Scrabble. We play a modified version: a small marker indicates both where to start and what word to spell. We work through hulajnoga (scooter), kot (cat), dom (house/home), and of course mama (mom).

It might be no surprise that the Girl won the majority of the rounds: it’s tempting sometimes to let her win to keep her interest up. (And it’s equally tempting occasionally to arrange a loss or two in order to help her learn how to lose gracefully.) This evening, though, she wins fair and square.