Wigilia 2025

Wednesday 24 December 2025

"[W]e’ll appreciate it all the more next near when Nana is back with us." That's how I ended our Wigilia 2018 post. It was our first Wigilia without Nana, and the loss was still raw for all of us but especially for Papa. For Wigilia 2021, I only posted pictures: our first Christmas without both Nana and Papa, I just didn't have much to share. It was a strangely haunting Wigilia for me.

Today's sole preparation picture: I was out hunting down fish since Publix messed up our trout order.

"Will you stop taking pictures of me?" Why, when you're so beautiful?

Christmas Eve in South Carolina with the door left open

In 2023, I wrote, "We move through these lasts without even thinking about them, without even realizing their presence." The next year, though, was likely the last time our usual Wigilia crew was together.

K's beet salad was absolutely the best ever prepared.

Wigilia is one of those markers in our lives that shows us just how much things have changed. Pictures with opłatek show the growth of our children: at first, we're bending down to share the Christmas wafer; a few short years later, everyone is standing. Opening Christmas presents shows our children's increasing independence in unwrapping presents, then in buying presents. The presents themselves and our children's reactions to them demonstrate their increasing maturity: shrieks at cars and Barbies give way to thankful smiles for art supplies and clothes.

What did the Boy steal from the house and pack into this?

The last journal prompt at school:

When you’re old and gray like Mr. Scott, and you look back on your Christmases of your childhood, what do you think you will miss most? What is the most special thing about this time of year for you?

One can scarcely think too little of Christmas; the time when children remember the past and old people forget the present.
Charles Dudley Warner, “Christmas”

I like to encourage my students to think hypothetically, and what better way than for them to imagine themselves forty years older looking back on their lives now. Forty years for an eleven-year-old kid is an eternity, an unimaginably long stretch of unimaginable adventures. The kids took to it immediately, though. Sometimes, they're chatty about this or that, not as interested in the day's particular topic. That day, though, heads dropped, brows furrowed, and pencils scratched wildly. Most of the kids who shared later spoke of memories they currently have, memories of Christmas as eight-year-olds, of kindergarten Christmas, of times that likely seem as distant to them as my topic seemed.

After their journal writing, I shared with them my own thoughts: what Christmas tradition would I like to relive just one more time?

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth…
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

Isn't it obvious? Once more with Nana and Papa. Second place? Christmas in Polska. The former will never happen; the latter -- it might. It just might.

This thought of returning to Christmases past is, of course, hardly novel. Charles Dickens used it as a framing device for probably the most famous Christmas story of all time, and he revisited the nostalgia we feel in other novels as well. It's something of a luxury, I suppose, to wist for the past when so many people's past is simply struggle, which often persists to the present.

But as Proust pointed out, "Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were." Is this even true of hardships of the past? Don't couples often look back nostalgically at how relatively poor they were when they began their journey together?

The Boy's present to the Girl -- her computer.

Papa often told stories of their early marriage, hectic and rushed, trying to make ends meet, and eating "anything and everything Campbells ever put in a can and called soup." He told the stories with such joy, the act of telling as wonderful to him as the memory itself.

Wigilia Preparation 2025

Tuesday 23 December 2025

Wigilia 2024

Tuesday 24 December 2024

Going into Wigilia sick is no fun. K was ill during the 2011 Wigilia, and I had to make the barszcz as a result. It was probably not as good as K's.

Still worse than heading into Wigilia sick is going into it after an operation. The Girl's last Wigilia here as a full-time resident of our house and it was a struggle for her -- the whole day.

She stayed in her room for most of the day. "I'm saving my energy for tonight," she explained.

Evening came and she put some nice clothes on, came down stairs, and had dinner with us. After soup, she took a break in the living room, but she came back for the fish.

When it came time for the gifts, she lay on the couch and smiled as E passed out all the gifts she'd bought for everyone.

That was a bit of a role change: she's always been so thrilled to get the gifts (what kid isn't?), but tonight, she was more enjoying watching everyone else open her gifts.

The Girl is growing up. In fact, how long can we continue calling her "the Girl"? Isn't she legally an adult now? A woman?

But some things never change. Wigilia never changes. The same food every year. Perhaps a different fish -- trout this year. Or did we have trout last year as well?

And the same faces around the table, with one exception -- a new guest this year.

So if some things don't always change, if some things just stay the same seemingly forever, I guess the Girl can remain the Girl in our eyes indefinitely.

And what of the Boy this year? He retained his role as the gift distributor, but his voice is a little deeper now when he hands someone a gift.

But some things with the Boy don't change: he's still the most grateful gift-receiver.

Everyone, happy with their gifts, discussed whether to go to Mass tonight or tomorrow. They all decided on tomorrow, so we watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. The girls' pick. I hadn't seen it since I watched it in the theater, I don't think.

I checked the release date of the film: 1989. I was two years younger than the Girl is now. And like that, those thirty-five years disappeared.

The movie ended, and like that, yet another Wigilia was over. Everyone slowly went their own ways.

Another Wigilia.

Another little bit of perfection.

Wigilia Preparation 2024

Monday 23 December 2024

Getting ready for Wigilia is a multi-day affair. We actually began a couple of weeks ago by preparing an absolute truckload of pierogi and uszki for the dinner as well as the zakwas for the barszcz This morning K put the dried mushrooms to soak just before she began the vegetable stock for the barszcz (carrots, parsnips, celery, a couple of turnips, some prunes and an apple) and the beets themselves were roasting in the oven. As I was grating the roasted beets, she was preparing the crust for the cygan.As I cleaned up the mess we’d made, K was chopping the massive amount of dried fruit (mainly prunes, dried apricots, and raisins) cygan requires. As K was melting the butter, chocolate, and sugar to mix in with the dried fruit, I looked for recipes for spanakopita. A bit of a mixed morning.

In the afternoon? I’m sure K finished the cygan, and she was going to make a rolada, one of the Girl’s favorite desserts, for L. That was the plan. I’ve no pictures of that process, though, because I was with the Girl in the hospital. We arrived at twelve as instructed. At 3:30, the surgeon still hadn’t met with us.

“Things are running behind,” the nurse said. “That happens.”

True enough. Medicine, though, is the only industry for which we have this kind of patience. Everywhere else, we would have long ago gotten up and left. “We’ll take our business elsewhere.” Not such an option for surgery.

Finally, a little before four, they wheel the Girl back for her minor procedure: a deviated septum which has contributed to never ending sinus problems for our poor girl. The day before Wigilia is hardly the best time for surgery, but we have to fit it in wherever we can between volleyball, winter/indoor track, work, school, and everything else that crowds the Girl’s calendar. After waiting over three hours in preop, the Girl gets wheeled to the OR, and I head to the waiting room for more waiting.

It seems somehow appropriate that the last Wigilia that L is living at home is so wonky. It gets us thinking about how it’s so different from every other Wigilia and so similar at the same time. We spent the day not preparing as a family, and we go into Wigilia not even knowing how L will feel a day after surgery -- will she even want to sit at the table? (Not really a serious worry.) And yet Wigilia will be the same as it always is, as is my post about it: the timelessness of tradition in the midst of an ever-changing world for our family. Next Wigilia, L will be coming home from college, probably with a big list of foods she wants K to prepare and a big bag of laundry. It’s always been this way: all the same, never the same.

Wigilia 2023

Sunday 24 December 2023

First times almost never go unnoticed. When we’re experiencing something novel, we’re rarely not aware that it’s new. Our first kiss -- we all remember that. The first time we saw our first child -- no one could fail to realize the significance of the moment.

Sometimes, those firsts surprise us: my first Christmas was something I never thought I would experience, and while I doubt many people can remember their first Christmas, I clearly remember mine.

But lasts? We often don’t even realize we’re in the midst of some last, and we don’t realize it was a last until so much later. Our last Wigilia with Nana and Papa together in 2018 -- we didn’t realize it was the last. Our final Wigilia with Dziadek in 2007 -- we had no idea it would be our last. Our last Wigilia with Papa in 2020 -- no idea.

W. S. Merwin hints at this in “For the Anniversary of My Death”

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

We move through these lasts without even thinking about them, without even realizing their presence.

But some lasts approach. They haunt or taunt us from far off: our last day of duty for the year hangs tauntingly in front of us teachers every year. Our last time in a classroom in a given school -- we know it’s coming, and it haunts us. At least it did me both times I left Poland.

We’re approaching a last in our family: L is now seventeen, a junior in high school. Next year will be the last time she’s here for Wigilia for certain. Sure, she’ll be here for most of them in the years in college, maybe even all of them. But there will come a time when she decides to spend Wigilia with the family of someone she’s fallen for.

Then there will be the same situation for E five years later. He’ll move out, probably come to Wigilia with us more regularly than L (but who knows?), and we’ll never be certain like we are now that we’ll be spending the next Wigilia together.

And at some point, K and I will have our final Wigilia together, and we most likely won’t even know it.

So this all raises the obvious question: is it good to know that last has arrived or not? I think it depends on the event itself. In the end, though, it’s a moot point: we often don’t know our lasts when we happen across them.

But what if we tried to live each moment as if it were our last time doing whatever mundane task was at hand? What if we washed dishes as if we’d never get to do it again? Such a simple mundane task that has marked our lives with such regularity that we don’t even think about it. Putting it in the context of a potential last seems to imbue it with some sparkle it lacked before. And I guess that sparkle really comes from us -- and we can dispense them wherever we choose. We can make a conscious choice to live our lives as if ever single event were the last time we do that, or even the last thing we do on earth. It seems like it could be the ultimate life lived in the now.

Foods of Wigilia 2022

Tuesday 27 December 2022

Wigilia 2022

Saturday 24 December 2022

Tonight, K and I celebrated our twentieth Wigilia together. Twenty Christmas Eves. Hundreds, no, likely thousands, of uszki. Cakes upon cakes upon cakes. Salads and sides, fish and oplatki, pierogi and presents. Twenty years of them.

A very significant Wigilia indeed.

Over the years, various significant Wigilias have passed without us realizing their significance. The last Wigilia with Dziadek was in 2007: he would live another six years, but we were never again together during the Christmas season.

Wigilia of 2017 was our last Wigilia with Nana. She was in the rehabilitation hospital in 2018, and by Wigilia 2019, she had passed away. We, of course, didn't know this was the last Wigilia with her. Perhaps that's for the best? Too depressing -- just treat every Wigilia as if it's the last one with those around you.

Wigilia 2020 was our last one with Papa. Again, if we had known...

By then, he was "Papa" to everyone, the resident elder with patience and love enough to match his years -- to surpass them by far, in fact.

And so last year's Wigilia was significant in that it was the first without either Nana, Papa, or Dzidek, and physically without Babcia as she was in Polska. Their absence doesn't go unnoticed, to be sure, but we've all grown accustomed to the new world without them.

E's present, which he wrapped himself, for L

This year's affair was the most intimate we've ever had. Even our close friends from Asheville weren't here, only the youngest of the crew, C.

And how was it with such a small group? No different. We shared the opłatki (inasmuch as American teens can be sentimental). We ate a small dinner -- relatively speaking.

We opened presents. Some were serious efforts to please; others, not so much. The Boy got a book on making small changes to make big changes in your life. It's called Make Your Bed. Perhaps that's a habit we're still having difficulty instilling in our son?

After the traditional Christmas Eve gift opening time -- what's not to love about that particular Polish tradition?! -- we stacked electronic devices into a single pile, pulled out a game we all agreed on playing, and proceeded to have the most lovely time together.

A screening of White Christmas -- what a lovely and innocent film! -- we headed off for Midnight Mass for the first time as a whole family in a very long time.