Probably my favorite video with the Boy…
christmas
Jasełka 2024
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.
Some Previous Years
Christmas Market
Sunday Prep
We have spent most of the weekend getting ready for Christmas. The Boy, for example, has his first Christmas concert as a member of his school’s wind ensemble. They don’t wear the usual Maudlin Middle band outfits for that performance; the girls wear formal black dresses and the boys wear tuxedos. The Boy’s tux pants are too long, so K hemmed them this morning.
Yesterday, I made the farsz for the pierogi and uszki we’ll have during our Wigilia meal in a few weeks. Today, K made them. We have every cutting block and baking sheet covered in dumplings of various size in both freezers of the house.
How many times have we had these prep days? Well, truthfully, it’s something I could count. It seems timeless and endless, but that’s only a trick of the brain. We’ve been married twenty years now, so that seems to make counting simple. But of course, we spent Wigilia together several years before we were married. Twenty -two times now? Twenty-three?
Elf
Elf has made his yearly appearance, but this year, he seems just to be hanging out in the living room.
“I know it’s you and mom!” the Boy explained last year. And the year before that.
“But still, it’s fun, isn’t it?”
But this year, there it sits. Not moving. Not hiding.
Another sign that everyone is growing up. The traditions of Christmas slowly fall away. The Girl used to write a letter to Santa and leave out a snack. I can’t remember the last time she did that. The Boy searched for Elf. I can remember the last time he did that, but it seems to be just that — the last time.
Should we resist this? Should we try to cling to these things even after the kids have outgrown them? I think not. It’s time to move on, to grow up, to pick up new traditions.
Decorating 2024
And so we enter the Christmas season, which this year promises to be unlike any Christmas we’ve shared. This is the last Christmas that L will still be living at home. It certainly won’t be the last Christmas we spend together, but it will most likely (excluding any unforeseen contingencies) be the last Christmas that she spends with us where the weeks leading up and the weeks trailing off see her still in her lovely room. “I guess I’ll head back now,” will be the phrase we’re dreading next year.
Last year, apparently, was a last for us — at least for a while. I am no longer in charge of the tree: this year, the Boy insisted on taking care of the tree. He unloaded it yesterday afternoon, suspended it under the deck to allow the branches to relax a bit, and carried into the house by himself — irritated that I wanted a picture as he did it.
“You’re like the paparazzi!” he declared.
This reticence to having his picture taken has been building, and it’s positively a thing now. L has gradually disappeared from the majority of the entries because of similar reasons. It’s understandable: teens are so very self-conscious of everything they do, of how everyone might look at them. I remember those anxieties myself. I would have felt even more aware of myself during this time of year: nothing stands out like not celebrating Christmas. At least when you’re the one not celebrating it. Like so many “distinctives” in our little sect, that one is more wide spread than I would have suspected as a seventh grader.
He did allow me to snap a shot of him putting the first ornament on the tree.
And as we were putting lights on the house, there was not much he could do to protest.
I don’t have nearly the number of photos from my own childhood as my children have of theirs. The reason, of course, is simple: digital is cheaper. We currently have 135,184 pictures in our Lightroom library, and that’s including scanned pictures back through the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties — well before the masses went digital. There was certainly something about the old film days that’s lacking now: that wait. You take a shot and you think you have a really great shot, but you’re not sure. So you send the pictures off for development (or do it yourself — I’m fortunate to have had a little darkroom for a few years), and there’s that excitement going through the pictures (or watching the developer bring the image out of nothing).
I still get that a little with digital, though. Snap a picture and a series of possible edits in Lightroom start running through my head. I’m no longer wondering if I got the shot, though. And that delayed gratification — it’s gone for good.
Finally, we get everything up and L asks, “Why is are the lights on the tree blue at the top and white at the bottom?” Because, to return to the opening thoughts, this Christmas will not be like others. Nana and Papa have been gone for years now: this will be our sixth Christmas without Nana and our fourth without Papa, true, but it still feels wrong.
It will also be our first Christmas without a long-anticipated Christmas party. Almost everyone we usually spend Christmas with decided to go back to Poland for this Christmas. (That’s why we all got together on Thanksgiving: the only difference was the food and the lack of carols, though everyone made up for it singing everything else they could think of.) I can’t blame them: Christmas in Poland is magical in a lot of ways. But it means things will be different around here.
Quieter, for one.
That’s almost always a good thing.
St. Stephen’s Day 2023
Christmas 2023
Previous Years
- 2001: Christmas Carolers
- 2003: Christmas Day Walk
- 2005: Christmas Day 2005
- 2006: Christmas 2006
- 2008: Christmas 2008
- 2009: Wigilia 2009, Redux
- 2011: Holiday Riding
- 2012: Hodie Christus Natus Est
- 2013: God Rest Ye Gentlemen
- 2013: Christmas 2013
- 2014: Dual-Play
- 2014: Christmas 2014
- 2015: Christmas 2015
- 2016: Christmas 2016: Nostalgia
- 2017: Christmas 2017
- 2018: Christmas 2018
- 2019: Christmas 2019
- 2020: Christmas Day 2020
- 2021: Christmas Day 2021
- 2022: Christmas 2022
Wigilia 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.
Wigilia Prep 2023
First Presents
Wigilia Preparation
Christmas Tree
Getting the Christmas Tree and Random Memories
We’re still settling into a new routine with Babcia. K has gotten her old phone charged and running, but the closest Babcia has come to an iPhone is the old tablet we bought her years ago.
Nana struggled with smartphones as well. Papa made the switch fairly easily, and then when we brought him an iPhone to replace his Android phone, he made the shift without much complication. Nana just experienced frustration: a few tries, and she was done.
“I can’t even answer Papa’s phone!” she once declared. She just handed it to him. She wasn’t having it.
I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t a sort of willful helplessness: she’d never had any problem learning new things in the past. When Papa brought home a new computer in the early eighties, she learned how to use it. Each time he upgraded after that, she learned how to use it. New software, new user interfaces (i.e., the mouse). But for whatever reason, she just never had the motivation to learn how to use a smartphone.
Lights
Foods of Wigilia 2022
St. Stephen’s Day 2022
Christmas 2022
Wigilia 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.
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.
In short, a perfect Wigilia.
Wigilia Preparation 2022
The fact that I have only one picture from the day is illustrative of the wigilia that we will celebrate tomorrow: small and sparse.
It will be the second wigilia without Nana or Papa, and our friends/family from Asheville won’t be coming down. A quiet evening with the family.