Every year for as long as I can remember there being an active Polish community in a local parish, the Poles have gathered for a Christmas potluck. Everyone shares the opłatek tradition, sings carols, and simply spends time together. Before all this, though, is the jasełka performance.
We’ve been doing it for so long that the kids who participated in it when we first began fifteen years ago are now done with college. Every year, though, a group of kids would put on the Christmas play. Every new a few faces disappeared and a couple of new faces made appearances.
It was truly a labor of love, cliche though that might be. Parents brought their kids for rehearsals, helped the kids learn their lines, created costumes and a set. Someone would have to find a script online. Someone would have to arrange for space for rehearsal. It took weeks to get everything together.
One year L was Mary. Another year the Boy was the baby Jesus. And once, in a pinch, L was Mary. That might have been the year E was Jesus. Or maybe not. Fifteen years of performances have all run together into a blur.
This year was the first year there was no jasełka. At all. But there were carols. There was a meal. There were opłateki. And there was, as always, a special moment for everyone to thank Father Theo, the parish’s head priest. He’s a gentle man from Columbia who took over celebrating the Polish Mass when no Polish priests could. He’s gradually added to the portion of the ceremony more and more Polish, and now, he celebrates almost the entire Mass in Polish.
“I love Polish!” he said this evening. “All that sh sh ch sh sh sh!”
The whole afternoon/early evening is a microcosm of all my little obsessions: the passage of time, the loveliness of tradition, the importance of family, the importance of culture, the love of good food.
Things change; time passes; people grow up; people grow old; it all stays the same; it all passes in the blink of an eye.
Everything I write about here almost incessantly.
