I haven’t been to many purely American Christmas parties where friends and family gather, but I don’t recall people continually singing carols during the evening.
That’s a Polish thing. Perhaps other cultures do it as well, but it’s a Polish thing for sure. Especially among expats.
I sit and smile during such sessions: I don’t know the words in their entirety (snatches here and there, perhaps a chorus), but I know the melody and am content just observing.
A few shots from our Christmas walk with friends.
Few pictures from the party with the same friends because we were to busy having a Christmas party: eating, drinking, singing, talking, laughing, repeating.
Christmas in contemporary culture is all about the gifts. “What did you get for Christmas?” “Look what I got for Christmas!” “Did you hear what Sally bought Harry for Christmas?” It seems easy to get caught up in the commercialism of the day when it surrounds you as it does in our culture.
Yet throughout the evening, I kept thinking of the gifts of a different sort that we were getting on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis if only we look around. There’s much to be thankful for even in the simplest events of a day.
There are the obvious things: we have a lot of food in the house now, more than seems decent. And we have a woman in our lives who spent an inordinate amount of time preparing it for us. Sure we all helped a little, but keeping things in perspective, it was a very little indeed.
We have a warm and cozy home — a place to prepare that food and eat it later, and a place to sleep when the day is done. We have warm clothes. All these things are necessary, but we could do with a lot less of all these things.
Where we really find cause for gratitude is in the family itself. That’s where the real gifts are.
“[E]ven in such moments tinged with temporary loss, there was a bit of brightness — we’ll appreciate it all the more next near when Nana is back with us.” Thus I ended last year’s thoughts on Wigilia, and here it is, a year later, and Nana is not back with us. It’s hard not to get depressed about things like that. Yet Papa expresses his gratitude for the simple fact that Nana suffers no more, and that he was the one that was left behind. “That was her single greatest fear,” he’s explained to friends and family.
Having Papa around all the time, though the cause of it all is in many ways tragic (but not all ways: see above), is a gift to the kids, especially the Boy. E spends a great deal of time in Papa’s room, watching drawing videos on the computer, eating a snack, sketching something out, playing with cars, just hanging out. “It’s my favorite room in the house,” the Boy has insisted multiple times.
And then there’s Ciocia M and her daughters: they are more like family than just about anyone we know in the States. T, C, L, and E are not family only by a technicality of blood, and I sometimes feel that Ciocia M and K must have been sisters in a previous life if such lives exist.
But why think about previous lives when we’re so fortunate to have the present life we have?
Wigilia 2003
Wigilia 2004
Wigilia 2005
Wigilia 2006
Wigilia 2007
Wigilia 2008
Wigilia 2008
Wigilia 2009
https://matchingtracksuits.com/2010/12/25/wigilia-2010/
Wigilia 2011
Wigilia 2012
Wigilia 2013
Wigilia 2014
Wigilia 2015
Wigilia 2016
Wigilia 2017
Wigilia 2018
It was a rainy day — good thing everything we had to do was indoors. K did a lot of cooking; I did a little helping and some shopping; the kids did some cleaning, some cooking, and some playing.
This year has been a little different than almost all years previous. Usually, we’ve been working on this for several days by this point. Last year, it was different due to Nana’s condition; this year, it was a family reunion and church obligations. The result: we’ve planned a very scaled back Wigilia. No mushroom soup — that will come Christmas day. A simpler meal altogether. Mass at four in the afternoon (the Girl is singing). Wigilia promises to be different tomorrow. Quieter. Simpler.
I can’t help but think that’s a good thing.
The Polish community in the area has a mass on the last Sunday of every month, but just before Christmas, there’s a special mass. We’ve done it every year for ten years now.
So much has changed.
Families have moved into the area and out. New families have moved from Poland; old families (at least one — perhaps more that I don’t know of, but the plural sounds better) have returned to Poland. The kids to put on the Christmas pageant in those early years are now in college; many of the kids performing now weren’t even born then. We parents are all a little older, slower, wiser (?); some more cynical, some more devout; some rounder, some not. The world is a different place; our city is a different place.
Yet the pre-Christmas jasełka-centered Sunday has held steady through it all.
I count myself among those in the “more cynical” list, at least about the whole Catholic/theistic enterprise. I find myself moving more and more back to my old skeptical position, the animosity I felt toward religion returning.
Yet at its best, this is what religion provides: markers by which we can measure our lives, strengthen our communities, and share with friends.
And who could deny the beauty of the opłatek tradition?
Jase?ka 2017
Jase?ka 2016
Jase?ka 2015
Six and Jaselka
Jase?ka 2013
Jase?ka
Performance
Jase?ka
K and I decided we were going to forego the usual outside decorations this year and try something new. With two trees in the front yard, there seemed to be only one thing to do: transform them into Christmas trees.
“It should be faster than putting up the icicle lighting,” K said.
“Should be,” I agreed.
So while K was running her first open house as a real estate agent, the kids and I set about wrapping some 344 feet of lights (8 lines of 43 feet each) around our crape myrtles.
I wasn’t sure how it would turn out because of the random places we had to string a line from one branch to another, creating a strange horizontal bit in an otherwise verticle orientation.
In the end, I think it turned out fairly well.
“How long did it take?” asked K earlier this evening.
“About as long as the icicle lighting.”
Maybe next year we’ll do both…or neither.
Six years ago, on December 7, we put up our Christmas tree. It’s a fairly early time for us to put up a tree, I think. I haven’t gone back to check (i.e., look for posts here), but knowing my Polish wife and her desire to keep with the traditions of her youth as much as possible, it’s probably always been later than sooner.
Of course, an odd highlight of the night was liberating the Elf from E’s sleeping hold and deciding where to put him tonight…
E’s class has an Elf on the Shelf. You know the gag: every morning, when the kids come in, the elf is sitting somewhere else. The kids all have a good time looking for him.
Of course, the Boy then wanted one for our house. Fortunately for him, K is Polish, which means we celebrate St. Nicholas’s Day, which is today, which meant lots of excitement in the morning when we left the elf behind, wondering when he’d start migrating through the house.
K texted Papa in the morning. “Please put Emil’s elf in a different location, maybe somewhere in your room. He is supposed to migrate through the house magically. That will make him very happy.” And it did.
When the Boy went with K for tennis lessons this evening, the elf took off again. This time, he headed to Papa’s bathroom and perched himself high on the medicine cabinet.
“We have to be systematic in our search,” I explained as we ate.
“What does that mean?”
I explained; he agreed.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he declared a few minutes later.
“Just go to Papa’s,” I suggested. “It’s closer.”
In he went; out he went — didn’t notice at all.
In our systematic search, he began going through all of Papa’s drawers.
“He’s an elf on a shelf, buddy, not an elf in a drawer,” I reminded, but he continued. Systematically.
We moved to the bathroom and he looked about, suggesting that perhaps the elf might have sought refuge in the washer or dryer. Nope.
He’d started moving to the living room when I pointed out that he’d forgotten one item with a shelf.
Our small X100 in hand, I jumped back as quickly as I could to frame the shot and managed to catch him just at the moment of discovery.