My first Wigilia — Christmas Eve — celebration was a tense affair. Six months in Poland in December 1996, I’d returned to the host family with whom I’d stayed during the twelve-week training session. While I got along marvelously with my host mother, her son (I suppose one would call him a “host brother”), four years my junior, was not always the most pleasant person to be around. “There’s a lot of tension between you two!” a fellow PCV remarked after spending some time with the two of us. The tension didn’t lessen that Christmas, and it was, in fact, the last time I visited them.
The next year was the first Wigilia that gave me a hint of what it should be like. I spent it with neighbors in the small village in which I’d been posted. They were so much like family that I’d taken to calling the matriarch “Mama.” I had dinner with the whole family that snowy Christmas Eve before heading to Babcia’s to meet with the rest of the family. Laughter, singing, joy — I knew this was what Christmas Eve was supposed to be like.
My third Wigilia was in Berlin, with family of an Indian friend that made for a warm mix of the Subcontinent and the Black Forest.
The next time I celebrated a true Polish Wigilia was three years later, after having spent two years in Boston before realizing that there was something — little did I know at the time, someone — I’d left behind in Poland. I was back with my neighbors, now my landlords, as I was renting a room from them. Still like family, we celebrated another proper Wigilia, waiting for the first star to appear as the various aromas of the waiting feast drifted through the house.
Finally, during Wigilia 2002, I spent the evening with K and her family. K and I had let our long friendship evolve into something more, and while I might not have been able that evening to say it with 100% certainty, it seemed like the first of many Christmas Eves together.
Christmas Eve 2003 we were engaged. A friendship that had begun seven years earlier was a few short months away from becoming a life-long and joyous commitment.
We married a little over four months before our third Christmas Eve together. My folks — Nana and Papa, though still two years away from being Nana and Papa — had sent a tree ornament that celebrated “Our First Christmas,” with an inset for a cameo-size photo. It hangs on our tree as I type, a yearly reminder of that first year together.
By 2005, we were in the States. It was our first solo Wigilia in the kitchen. We learned a lot that year, including how to make the fermented-beet zakwas for barszcz.
In 2006, we had our first Wigilia as a family of three, the Girl still delicate bundle of spitting-up joy.
Since then, we’ve begun new traditions, with new guests that arrive every year to celebrate this holy night with us. We share the opłatek, enjoy a traditional meal of barszcz z uszkami, pierogi, fish, kapusta. We open our gifts and try them out — “Can you hear me, over?”
When the guests are gone and my girls are asleep, I sit in the living room, reflecting at the wonder of love and family, and I find myself aware that, as perfect as this evening was, it can only get better.
Previous Years
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