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Dickensian Afternoon

Thursday 11 January 2018

It was so foggy this afternoon that I could think of only one thing: the opening to Dickens’s Bleak House:

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

The dog and the kids spent the day indoors. A miserable day if you want to go outside. Dzien barowa.

At times, the school year seems to extend endlessly, a pile of days that stretches beyond our sight, under which we all seem to be crushed slowly. If there’s a class that’s an inordinate challenge, the weight of that pile seems to double, and somehow, no matter how well things are going in the year, a few more days seem to be tossed carelessly on the pile as third quarter approaches. “What?! I’m this exhausted, and we’re just now in the back half?!”

Other times, the year seems entirely too short, something requiring calipers to measure. The list of standards the state requires teachers to cover seems to require twice the days the state allocates for the challenge. Some standards seem as if they might take a lifetime to master in and of themselves. “Assess the processes to revise strategies, address misconceptions, anticipate and overcome obstacles, and reflect on completeness of the inquiry.” I’m still working on that one. “Determine appropriate disciplinary tools and develop a plan to communicate findings and/or take informed action.” Ditto.

In between those two, the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, allocate a certain number of days to testing. In the decade-plus I’ve taught in the States, that number seems to grow every year. In the case of the hard-to-handle classes, it’s a relief in a sense — for the obvious reasons. It’s tiring keeping them focused and engaged every day, and a test is just the right mind-numbing exercise to make the period pass by fairly painlessly. They get little to nothing out of it, and they put little to nothing into it, and everyone knows that’s what’s going to happen, but we do the dance anyway, and everyone goes home with their dance card happily filled. And yet for those same classes, it’s a nightmare, for teachers already feel we’re trying to cram too much into to little.

It just doesn’t seem like the proper use of time.

2

Wednesday afternoons are often when I catch up with school work. The Girl has choir practice, until five and K and the Boy are out doing the grocery shopping as they wait, and so when I arrive home, the house is empty and silent. I make a cup of coffee, get out some papers to grade, or more likely, load this or that website that now holds my students’ work and begin assessing, or I start sketching out my plans for the next week’s activities.

Frustration at the difficulty of cleaning up after an experiment

Today, however, I had a thought: I don’t have anything to do for school that is terribly pressing; my school is quite near the Aldi where K and E are shopping; I could easily pick up the Boy and take him home for a bit of playing. I called K; she asked the Boy; he was thrilled. Home we went, talking all the way about what we might play.

We settled on cars, with a bit of blocks. And in the midst of it all, out of seemingly nowhere, we ended up building jails for the misbehaving cars. E designed one, which meant he placed the blocks, and I hunted them down for him if he couldn’t find them. Then we tested it, which meant he rammed a big car into the jail to see if it stood. It didn’t; the bad car escaped. So we did it again, alternating who designed the jail. No jail held the prisoner for longer than a few moments when the Boy really set his mind and muscles to the task.

We made a big mess. The Boy got semi-hurt as he crashed his car into the pile a bit too hard. I accomplished absolutely nothing for school.

It was a proper use of time.

First Day Out

Tuesday 9 January 2018

It’s been cold here lately — ridiculously cold for South Carolina. The majority of the nights over the last ten days have been below freezing, which is something here; a substantial number (a majority of that majority?) have been below 20 degrees. In Poland, nothing out of the ordinary; K and I are used to such things. Here? It’s ridiculously cold.

Add to it the tragic fact that we’ve all taken turns getting sick over that same period of time and it’s obvious why no one has done much of anything outside these last few days. The dog is the only exception: she doesn’t really care. The rest of us have done our best to stay warm.

So when we all were home and it was 59 degrees this afternoon, there was only one thing to do.

The Boy and the Girl were happy to jump on the trampoline again. The new trampoline, which should actually have some bounce to it, is still in parts on the basement floor.

“Let’s wait until it warms up,” K encouraged. That was Christmas. It’s still on the floor.

“Daddy! Today it’s warmed up! Can you work on the trampoline?” was the refrain from both the kids, but I was too busy laughing with K as she jumped out of the swing like a teenager.

The dog was thrilled to have someone to play with her again. She’s really such a gregarious dog. She’ll play outside by herself for a while, but she’s always happy to have a companion. And don’t even think about doing something outside the newly fenced area: she’ll stand at the fence and whimper like she’s being abused.

Snowless Snow Day

Monday 8 January 2018

We haven’t really tried to force the Girl, as she gets older, to learn how to cook. She’s learned how to clean her room, to dust, to wash a window, to clean the hardwood floors in our house, but cooking, we just didn’t really make her. I don’t know about K, but I figured that she’ll learn when she’s interested. That’s how it was with me. Still, as she nears middle school, we’ve been talking about how, at the very least, she needs to begin making her own lunch for the day.

This weekend, she decided she wanted to make chocolate chip muffins. She didn’t want help other than buying the ingredients and going over the recipe with her. The rest, she wanted to do. So when we went to bed last night, it was with the plan of making muffins in the afternoon after school.

Little did we know that school had already been canceled in anticipation of a front that was supposed to bring ice and freezing rain but never really materialized. We woke up, went through our normal morning routine, and somehow, though the local news was on, missed that Greenville County Schools had canceled everything for the day. We found out when L and I arrived at her school only to find an empty parking lot. “It can’t be a two-hour delay,” I thought, “because there would be some cars there. Someone would be there.” We returned home to find that there was no school, so afternoon muffins became morning muffins.

She began cooking, and I, still not feeling 100%, took the opportunity to lie down for a while. I went to the kitchen occasionally to check on the progress, but overall, she seemed to be doing well, with a little help from the Boy. His help with her was much like his help with anyone: only slightly helpful, often less than helpful, but always eager.

L called me in to help her when she was filling the muffin forms. I looked at the dough and had my doubts.

“Did you follow the instructions very closely?” I asked.

“Yes,” she assured.

“And you mixed this very well?” I asked, wondering how she could have done it without using the mixer. It was thick and not easily budged: it would have been a nightmare to do it by hand.

“Yes.”

I took a spatula and found most of the sugar and a good bit of the flour still sitting at the base of the mixing bowl, untouched.

“Oh,” she laughed.

We threw it in the mixer, combined the ingredients thoroughly, and got put everything in the muffin forms.

“Now put it in the oven,” I said.

“Me?!”

The Girl doesn’t deal with heat well. Things that seem only lukewarm to K and me threaten to scald her, to send her to the emergency room with third-degree burns. But with a little encouragement, she was able to open the door, put the pan in, and pull it back out in twenty minutes when the buzzer went off.

And the result? For a first attempt, utterly amazing. For any attempt, really very good. Moist, chocolatey, and perfect. A hit for the whole family.

The upshot of this: the Girl was eager to cook again. When it was dinner time, she wanted to learn to make the rice. Instead of just plain old rice, though, I taught her to cook a quick and easy risotto. After looking through a cookbook and finding a recipe for lemony broiled chicken, she’s ready to cook a full dinner next week.

And the rain and ice that shut down schools? Nothing. The ground was dry until early afternoon. A district spokeswoman explained it to a local news outlet:

“When an alert of that magnitude is issued we have to consider the problems it would present not only for our bus riders, but also car riders, including high school drivers, who travel over bridges and on curvy roads,” Brotherton said. “We considered the circumstances that occurred in Asheville on December 31st when even small amounts of fog and drizzle quickly turned to ice on roadways and led to treacherous road conditions and multiple wrecks. After a week of freezing temperatures and already cold roads, asking parents, students and employees to travel in the predicted conditions was not a risk we were willing to take. Safety always comes first.”

It’s not the first time something like this has happened; it won’t be the last. But we’ll always make the most of such days.

Counting Costs

Sunday 7 January 2018

How much does it cost to have a puppy? There are the upfront costs — the puppy itself, shots, sterilization, etc. There are the hidden costs — a new fence, multiple harnesses to find the right one, etc. Then there are the destructive costs — shoes chewed, furniture chewed, etc. We’ve been lucky in the latter, perhaps because we’ve been unlucky in the former two. We’ve managed to keep Clover from destroying much of anything of value. She’s learned more or less to ignore shoes. More or less. She went through a gnawing on furniture legs phase, but that seems to have passed as well. However, there’s a chair in the living room that she enjoys chewing the bottom of, which probably won’t make it through her puppyhood.

So I guess we should be thankful…

(A random thought to keep my post-every-day-for-a-month goal going even though I’m not 100% and slept most of the day…)

Memory

Saturday 6 January 2018

The Boy gets on a kick and stays on it for some time. For the last few weeks, it’s been Go Fish. Now it seems to be shifting to Memory.

We have an animal-themed version we brought back from Poland, and it has a ridiculous number of pairs. I haven’t counted them, but I’d say it’s close to forty. I can say this because we were organizing them for a morning game and E wanted more than the fifteen pairs we played with yesterday. I pulled out twenty pairs and there seemed to be just as many still in the stack.

“Why can’t we play with all of them?”

I thought of how playing with fifteen went. It was a surreal experience. I wasn’t really trying to remember anything, to be honest; I was turning up cards, letting the Boy see them, then turning them back over. But somehow, as if by instinct, I was turning over cards to make pairs. It’s not that I didn’t want the pairs; it’s not that I was trying to let the Boy win. I just wasn’t putting forth much effort myself, or so I thought.

We compromised on twenty, but it was a bit overwhelming for the Boy: after several minutes, he’d only found one pair, and I’d found two.

Hard and Soft

Friday 5 January 2018

We were at Nana’s and Papa’s this afternoon, and I asked the Boy who he wanted to ride back with.

“Mama!”

“That’s right — no one loves Tata!” I laughed.

Later in the evening, as the Boy was nestling into his covers for the night and I lay beside him, he stroked my cheek and said, “Daddy, you’re the best daddy. And I always love you no matter who I ride home with.”

Final game of Memory before bed — just after the snack

He paused for a moment, then added, “It’s just that Mommy is soft, and you’re a hard chunk.”

Scientific Go Fish

Thursday 4 January 2018

The Go Fish obsession continues. Someone plays with the kids every night, and they occasionally play together by themselves. We’ve yet to tackle a four-player game, though I’m not sure why. The kids don’t seem to eager for whatever reason, and so perhaps that’s why we haven’t tried.

Tonight, as I was playing with them, I stood to get something from the other side of the room, and I accidentally glanced at the Boy’s cards. (He has them spread out in a chair beside him, so the natural gesture to avoid seeing someone’s cards — looking down when passing — doesn’t work.) I did notice that he had a yo-yo (we play with a picture-based card set), and since I had a yo-yo, I thought I’d do a little experiment.

“L, do you have a yo-yo?” I asked during my next turn. E was set to go next, and I was ready for him to ask me if I had a yo-yo. He had been a little distracted, though, and asked instead, “L, do you have a yo-yo?”

L looked at me; I smiled back at her.

“E, I just asked her that,” I laughed. “You should have asked me that just then. Now, I’m going to ask you for it next turn.”

He just smiled.

In Praise of Return

Wednesday 3 January 2018

Coming back to school can be a relief for many of our students. They come from less than stable home lives, and the predictability of school is a comfort for them. These are often the kids that most often exhibit problematic behavior. Our principal sent us all an email to this effect. It read, in part, “Many of our students have experienced unrest over the break. Without their normal routines, meals, and social interactions found at school, they may need a readjustment period (and your grace) when returning.”

One of the things I’d decided to change in my class was to provide a mechanism for regular praise of students, both individual and group. The individual is easier: it’s just one person praising another. The group praise, though — lots of kids focusing on the good actions of one student. That was a tough one.

In developing the lesson, I thought we should spend some time writing and thinking about praise, so I prepared a Pear Deck for the kids (which allows them to respond to given prompts and see their and others’ responses projected anonymously. It’s a great way to have a real-time anonymous discussion), asking questions about when they were last praised, how it felt, when they last praised someone else, how that felt.

Some of the answers were telling, echoing the ideas in the principal’s email.

I asked students when they last remembered being praised. One student’s response was memorable:

The last time I remember being praise was when I manage to talk to people because I can’t really socialize with people. Another time I was praised was when I was working on something for a story and the person read it, and they said it was an amazing idea!

This young lady is one of the best students I’ve ever had: hard-working, kind, very intelligent, but painfully shy.

When I asked “How does it feel when you’re praised,” some of the answers really stood out:

It made me feel special and proud of my work that I have done. I barely get noticed on things so it like amazing to be praised.
I felt nothing because I didn’t care.

Finally, I asked students to consider why praise might be important, given all the responses they’d given and read. One showed that at least one student understand how much impact something positive can have: “For example, it could be one compliment that could save someone’s life…… They could be depressed and just needed someone to be nice to them and show them that people care about them.”

Contrast this awareness with how students so often treat each other, with insults and snide comments that are meant to build themselves up by tearing others down. I wonder if anyone else saw the irony. Smart kids — I’m sure they did.

Last Day of Break

Tuesday 2 January 2018

“Daddy, I don’t understand. On Sid the Science Kid, the teacher calls all of the children scientists.” The Boy paused for a moment: he’s learned how to pause to heighten the moment just a bit. “That can’t be right! They can’t be scientists!”

We were on our way home from shopping, leaving the girls at home this last day of break. K stayed home because of a lingering illness, so we were together for the morning, but the Boy and I headed out after lunch to do the week’s grocery shopping.

“Why can’t they be scientists?” I asked, wondering what he had in mind.

“They’re just kids!”

“So?”

“To be a scientist, you have to have a job. That’s your job. A scientist,” he explained still frustrated, though sometimes with him it’s hard to tell if the frustration is real or just pretend, as if he’s trying it on for size.

I thought about his definition and reasoning for a few moments, thought about why the teacher would be calling children scientists — obvious for an adult, not so much for a child.

“Well, E, it’s a question of scientific thinking. She’s calling them scientists because they’re behaving like scientists. They’re thinking like scientists.” This satisfied him for a few moments, but it didn’t satisfy me. I was wondering if he would ask what it means to think scientifically, hoping he would ask. He didn’t, so I prompted him. “Do you know what that means, to think like a scientist?”

“No.”

“It’s a process. You observe. You think about why things happen. You make predictions about why things happen; you check those predictions…”

I fear a lot of Americans really have no clue what it means to think like a scientist.

The other night, while on a walk, I was listening to an old sermon by a religious leader, and he was railing against “intellectualism.” He never really defined it. He never really explained why it was so bad other than to say it was vanity. He was upset about how some Biblical scholars will spend so much time picking at the smallest little detail, and as he said that it occurred to me that he really didn’t have a firm grasp of what those scholars were doing, how they were examining the text, their methodology and the justification for it.

I think this is a common thread in America, this anti-intellectual position, and it’s directed at all sciences. People dismiss all sorts of things they, were they taught like Sid the Science Kid to think scientifically, they likely wouldn’t dismiss, and they accept things that, were they taught like Sid the Science Kid to think scientifically, they would dismiss out of hand.

So I was very pleased when E later spoke of thinking scientifically. And as he played Go Fish with the girls, it occurred to me that here is a perfect opportunity for some basic critical thinking: observe (listen to what others are asking for); test (ask for a few things in a systematic way); repeat.

2017

Sunday 31 December 2017

The plan was simple: we were all going to bed early. Waiting for midnight on December 31/January 1? In the grand scheme of things, an arbitrary time in an arbitrary day? Whatever for? But L, who’d napped yesterday because of a lingering illness, really wanted to stay up.

What happened to my early bedtime? I decided to have a beer and watch another episode of The Same Sky, a great German mini-series set in Berlin during the Watergate crisis. There’s an East German spy, there are interrogation scenes in Hohenschönhausen, the main Stasi headquarters, there’s a family dealing with the effects of the East German doping sports machine — everything you could want in a series about East Germany. L appeared at the top of the steps and asked plaintively, “Can we stay up together?”

Of course, I agreed.

We went to the living room and spent the last forty minutes watching a bit of a documentary about the Russian revolution. Stalin got a mention early in the film, and I pointed out that he’s one of the most destructive figures in history.

“I know,” she said simply, explaining that in one of the books she recently read, Bombs for Hitler, one of the characters is Ukranian. And if anyone knew how evil Stalin was, it was Ukrainians at the end of the 1930s.

About ten to twelve, we began looking for live coverage of the ball drop in Times Square, but since we never watch network TV and don’t have cable, I’m really clueless about what local channels are, and we couldn’t find anything. By the time we decided it was no use, it was 11:59. Off went the television, and we waited for a few moments. Hugs, kisses — “Happy New Year.” And now it’s time for bed.

Decisions

Friday 29 December 2017

“I want a flat egg. No, no, I want a bagel and some Cheerios. And some milk.”

The Boy’s breakfast decision process is similar almost every day. I feel fortunate that we are in a position to provide him with so many choices, but at times, it exhausts us.

This indecision spills over into all parts of the Boy’s life. When given a choice for clothes, he can dither similarly. When given options for how to spend the afternoon, he can flip-flop similarly. It’s only a mild inconvenience, and probably common for his age. I can’t remember L being like that, but perhaps that’s just selective memory.

His indecisiveness comes into full bloom (to thoroughly mix my metaphors and split my infinitives) when he as a little money to spend, which has been the case for the last few weeks. He’d earned money with various chores and received some from aunts and neighbors, so for the last few weeks, he’s been playing out his options for how to spend his $30.

“I think I want a new log truck,” he said one day.

“But you had a log truck, remember. You lost all the logs, and now you don’t know where any of it is.” That probably wasn’t quite accurate: I don’t know those things are, which is not to say that he doesn’t know.

“Well, still, I think I want a new one.”

A few days after that, it was a new Nerf gun.

“Son, you have two Nerf guns.”

“But they don’t fire that well.” Don’t they? I wasn’t aware of that.

He toyed with a few other ideas, but when we went to the toy store tonight, he’d finally settled on a Nerf gun.

And then he had to choose which gun…

Cold Day

Thursday 28 December 2017

Two Days After Christmas

Wednesday 27 December 2017

Christmas 2017

Monday 25 December 2017

So often in life, things come to an end and we don’t even realize that we’re living through last moments of this or that. Someone might lose a job and the whole family leaves, and you never see them again. More tragically, someone might pass away unexpectedly, and we regret deeply that we didn’t know that the last time we were with that person.

When an end comes and we know it’s the end, then we tend to savor it all the more.

Friends are moving to Connecticut. Good friends, for the last several years. Christmas, Easter, and Halloween we have always been together for the last several years. And tonight was the last time we’ll all be together for Christmas, perhaps for good. Sure, we talked about going up to Connecticut for a visit, but the chances of that happening, of us all being together like that, are quite honestly very slim.

It added a gray lining to the rest of the evening.

Wigilia 2017

Sunday 24 December 2017

Down at the bottom of the page, there are posts about the last several wigilias. How many? K and I were counting this evening after the food had been put away, the dishes washed, the presents opened. Thirteen together with Nana and Papa, which would make fifteen together as a couple. I stop and think about it: that would make the first in 2002. Surely that’s not right. We got married in 2004, and we were engaged in 2003. I check my photos from that period and sure enough, there are the pictures of K preparing food at the table where this summer she sat with Babcia in the morning chatting over tea.

Fifteen years. Fifteen times we’ve put up a Christmas tree together, cooked and cleaned for wigilia together (though K has done the vast majority of the cooking), bought gifts together.

We began all this a couple of years before the students I currently teach were born.

It’s not that I’m obsessed with how much time has passed. I used to be that way, but I think it was youthful sentimentality that I eventually outgrew. It’s not that the time has passed but that I no longer really notice it. Not like I did when I was so eager to be somewhere I wasn’t at that moment, when I looked ahead instead of looked around, so eager to be older, beyond where I was, not who I was. Grown. And truth be told, I never really felt that way — grown — until things became serious with K, when the future began to take definitive form. But since then, with our move to the States, the birth of our children, the purchase and eternal remodeling of our house, the pressures of our jobs, and all the other things that pack our days and nights, I don’t often give it much thought.

That’s the greatest gift of wigilia: a pause, a step out of time with the rest of our lives, a ritual that calls us to reflect and remember the past and appreciate the present.

Nothing ever changes in wigilia. Nothing. We have the same preparation rituals, the same cleaning. The one change: the involvement of the kids increases. The Boy eagerly helps with anything; the Girl, not so much, but that is changing as she matures. She’s eleven now, nearing what promises to be one of the most challenging and rewarding period, her teens. Wigilia always provides a metric for growth, both in the amount of help she provides and the willingness with which she eats some of the things she’s not really crazy about.

Nothing ever changes in wigilia. Ever. We eat the same foods with little repetition. Barszcz z uszkami, pierogi z kapustą i grzybami, jakaś ryba. Zawsze tak samo. It’s the ultimate comfort food, recipes that have passed through generations with little change. I sometimes wonder what L and E might do with their families after we’re gone. Will they take these recipes with them? Will they find themselves reminiscing on Christmas Eve about how different their Christmas Eves were as children?

Nothing ever changes in wigilia. Nothing.We follow the same script with little repetition. A nativity story, usually from Matthew. We sing a Christmas carol, usually “Silent Night.” We share the opłatek. And our wishes for each other never change, always involving health in one form or other. Is there anything else we need to worry about? Is there a greater or more important wish we could have for others?

Nothing ever changes in wigilia. Ever. We even give the same gifts (a photo yearbook of the previous year’s adventures). It’s not the most fiscally generous gift, but it’s what everyone really wants. “We always look forward to getting it,” K’s sister-in-law once told us, and in truth, K and I truly enjoy making it. It’s a challenge to narrow a year’s worth of pictures (approximately 12,000 in 2017) to a selection to fit into roughly 150 pages. And for me, it’s always the same: a bottle or two of some libation. We’re all so easily pleased.

Nothing ever changes in wigilia. Nothing. We end the same way, sitting around drinking coffee, listening to carols, watching the kids play with their toys. This is something that will eventually change. L no longer gets toys, not in the sense of something she can play with. E will reach that point too. In ten years, L will be in college, E in high school, and what gifts will we be giving then? Lego won’t be so very special, but we’ll figure that out. Hopefully, the gift of just being home — the Girl coming home from her junior year of college in ten years — will be enough.

Nothing ever changes in wigilia. Ever. I end the evening alone, drink at hand, chewing on a cigar (and it’s even been the same cigar for the last few years, I would bet: a Partagas Black Label — a dark, earthy, rich, strong nicotine kick in the pants to end the evening), with Christmas music playing (this year, Chanticleer’s Psallite! A Renaissance Christmas), working on pictures taken throughout the day, then writing about it all — writing the same thoughts.

Nothing ever changes in wigilia. Nothing.

And yet there are all the little changes, little jewels of growth and change that make this year different from last. The Girl, singing soprano in the children’s choir under the direction of a new choirmaster who, looking for a change, has come through a miraculous chain of events from the Vatican where he was assistant music director at the Sistine Chapel to our little church in Greenville and has made the music of Mass positively angelic. The Boy, trying so hard to be a man, agreeing to change into more formal clothes because K explained that I would be doing the same. K, realizing she doesn’t have to do everything every year — notice: no kapusta z grzybami or zupa grzybowa on the menu, and only two deserts — and having a much more relaxed day as a result.

We’re all growing.

The truth is, everything changes every wigilia.

Everything.

Previous Years

Wigilia 2003

Wigilia 2004

Wigilia 2005

Wigilia 2006

Wigilia 2007

Wigilia 2008

Wigilia 2009

https://matchingtracksuits.com/2010/12/25/wigilia-2010/

Wigilia 2011

Wigilia 2012

Wigilia 2013

Wigilia 2014

Wigilia 2015

Wigilia Eve 2017

Saturday 23 December 2017

It should really have been a different few days. These last few days before Wigilia have always been filled with baking, decorating, cooking, cleaning, and anticipation.

There has been some preparation, to be sure. We’ve done the usual cleaning. But somehow, it just doesn’t seem possible that tomorrow is Wigilia. The build-up is somehow just not there.