The Tree
christmas
Mikołaj 2020
This morning, Elfie made his first appearance:
I was a little curious about E’s reaction this year: at the end of last year, he figured it out. “You guys just put Elfie out there, don’t you?”
“What makes you think that?”
And then he discovered where I’d hidden him the week after he disappeared last Christmas season.
“See! You did it!”
But this year, his class is doing Elf on the Shelf, so he either pretended to forget about it because of that, or he actually did forget about his conjectures last year.
Tonight, Elfie decided to do a little web browsing while he had the opportunity.
Previous Years
The Tree
Critical Santa
During dinner tonight, the topic of Santa came up. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” the Boy said confidently, “but I believe in Saint Nicholas.” I thought he might be thinking of the Polish version of Santa, Mikolaj, who comes on December sixth, or perhaps just he was just thinking of the actual Saint Nicholas of the Catholic church — you know, the bishop from Turkey.
“I knew this time was coming,” I thought. I’ve always felt a ting of guilt about the whole Santa thing: I knew perfectly well that Santa doesn’t exist, but I kept playing along, telling our kids that Santa does exist. Eventually they figure it out, but it just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Soon, though, he kind of back-tracked: “Well, I’m not sure.”
“What evidence do you have that Santa exists?” I asked him.
“What kind of evidence do you have that Santa doesn’t exist,” L jumped in like a typical thirteen-year-old who just wants to be contrary. (Is it only thirteen-year-olds that are like that?)
“No, sweetheart. Whenever people are making a claim, the burden of proof is on them. They have to provide evidence, not the skeptics who doubt the story,” I clarified. I thought about going into what it means to beg the question, but I didn’t, turning instead back to the Boy: “So what evidence do we have?”
He listed the toys, the imagery in movies, the stories.
“Can we explain those things with other methods? Is there a simpler way to explain the toys appearing under the Christmas tree?” Did I tell him we were applying Occam’s Razor? Certainly not. But we were shaving away.
“Well, you and Mom could put the toys under the tree,” he responded after some thought.
In the end, though, when pressed, he decided that he leaned toward a belief in Santa.
We’ll see how he views it next year.
Advent 2020 Begins
Today is the first day for the Advent calendars K has kept under wraps in the basement. L made sure to label hers to ensure the integrity of her 24-treat treasure, only to find that the first treat had an almond in the center of it.
“I can’t eat almonds,” she sighed.
Don’t worry — someone took care of it.
Already
Went to Lowe’s this morning for a new wax ring for a toilet. Walked in and saw this. This is two and a half months before Christmas. We have not only Thanksgiving to go but Halloween as well…
Carols
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.
Christmas 2019
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.
Wigilia 2019
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?
Carols During Mass
Previous Years
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
Wigilia Preparation 2019
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.
Pre-Christmas Family Reunion
Jaselka 2019
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?
Previous Years
Jase?ka 2017
Jase?ka 2016
Jase?ka 2015
Six and Jaselka
Jase?ka 2013
Jase?ka
Performance
Jase?ka
Outside Lighting
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.
Christmas Tree
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…
The Elf
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.
Boxing Day 2018
The holidays’ end always brings a tinge of sadness. All the anticipation, all the preparation, all the excitement — all behind us now, gone in a flash. Sure, there’s one last hurrah with New Year’s Eve coming up, but that’s just one evening. For us, it’s never really had any tradition behind it like Christmas.
Tomorrow, K goes back to work, M and T return to Ashville, leaving C for a couple of more days. Life slowly transformed into the holiday season, and now — boom! — it’s back to normal. But that’s probably a good thing. Living this kind of life all the time would make it the new normal. We’d struggle to get through endless parties and celebrations just as we sometimes struggle to get through seemingly-endless weeks at work and school.
Christmas 2018
During a proper party, a proper family gathering, time seems to disappear into an eternally present “now” that blends effortlessly out of the last moment, imperceptibly into the next, a continuum of laughter. A proper Christmas day, then, should be like a proper party. And what better way to start the smiles than a pile of hot waffles.
And what better activity after breakfast than to help with the Lego set the Boy got yesterday? Truth be told, it was a challenge for me to understand those instructions at times, so it’s no surprise that high on his priority list was getting some help.
We build this knowing that as soon as the snow plow is completed, it will be a focus of attention for a few days and then disappear into its constituent parts into the growing box of Legos that now must contain well over a thousand blocks, what with all the sets he’s gotten and the Lego windfall he got from his sister a year or so ago when she decided she was too old for Legos. Of course, you’re never too old for Legos, but there is a period called adolescence when you might think you are.
In the early afternoon, we all went to spend Christmas lunch with Nana. We ate some split pea soup and chatted while the children took turns rolling about in the wheelchair in Nana’s room.
Back home for the afternoon, we passed the afternoon at the table with talking with Papa while the kids played in the backyard, E still in his nice Christmas clothes that required some work when he returned because there was no way he was going out to play and not wind up at the creek that forms our rear property line. If you’re a six-year-old who has a creek in your yard, you use it.
Finally, around four-thirty, we headed to our closest friends’ house, the godfather of E (and he’s proud to remind us of that regularly) taking with us E’s godmother — K’s sister in everything but name and DNA and so for many reasons, the closest thing we have to Polish family here.
And so the evening just began slipping away, punctuated by grand food, silly kids, discussions of camping and finding cheap flights to the Old Country, hot toddies and black coffee, jokes, singing, and just enjoying the fact that we have such good friends.
(Click on images for larger view.)
But the Boy didn’t make it. He put up a fight, tried to stay awake the entire party, but there was just no way.
Santa
While waiting for breakfast — a delicious quiche that a lovely student gave me as a Christmas gift — the Boy asked a simple question: “Daddy, does Santa even exist?” The question took me unawares.
“Well, if he doesn’t, how do you think you get those presents?” I asked in response after a pause.
“You guys do it!” he shouted with a grin.
I’ve always been a little reluctant about the whole Santa thing. On the one hand, it’s harmless fun. On the other, it does necessitate misleading your child. I decided that this was the opportunity for which I’d been waiting to encourage critical thinking.
“Well, how could we figure it out? What kind of an experiment could we run to see?” I remembered Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining the experiment his daughter ran with her friend to test the existence of the Tooth Fairy: they decided they simply would keep secret any lost teeth and see if the TF showed up. She didn’t. Simple.
E couldn’t think of anything, but we went through the logic behind the Santa story — or rather, the lack thereof. Using a Socratic-type questioning method, reached the following conclusions:
- The North Pole is real, but that doesn’t prove much.
- People in Brazil don’t have chimneys, but they still get presents.
- The size of the average chimney makes it all but impossible for a human to slide down it with a sack of toys.
- The dirt in the chimney (I didn’t get into soot) might make the toys dirty, but the fact that they’re in a sack might keep them clean.
- The dirt in the chimney would definitely pose a problem when it came to leaving without a trace — there would be dirty footprints everywhere.
- It doesn’t seem possible to visit all homes in the world in a single night.
- The size of the sack needed to carry all the toys is unrealistic.
- Reindeer can’t fly.
When L joined us at the table, the Boy relayed the whole conversation to her, and she began apologetics for Santa.
I’m still not sure where the Girl stands on Santa. Surely she doesn’t believe anymore, but we’ve never had a conversation about it. And it’s just like the Girl to play devil’s advocate in such a situation.
In the end, the Boy stood more skeptical on the issue, and we decided that, even if Santa doesn’t exist, it’s fun to pretend he does. Perhaps that’s the best stance.
Preparing for Christmas
Opłatek
As a teacher, I often don’t always say the things I want to say. Most would interpret that negatively: “He doesn’t call kids jerks when he thinks they are.” That’s certainly the case, but for not so obvious reasons. Most obvious is the lack of professionalism such a pronouncement would exhibit, not to mention cruelty. More to the point, though, I don’t really experience that because I rarely — not never, but very, very rarely — hold such an opinion of a kid. They are, after all, kids. They’re still learning, still growing, and their impulse control and social skills are often simply not up to par because of a lack of maturity or a lack of consistent examples. I could count on one hand all the kids, over twenty years of teaching, that I just didn’t like as people. I haven’t met such a kid in several years now.
What I had in mind is the flip side of that — as a teacher, I don’t always tell a kid when I’m absolutely in love with some part of his journey, some portion of her personality, some facet of his persistence, some element of her youthful excitement.
I certainly tell a lot of kids a lot of positive things. But those moments seem relatively few and far between.
Why don’t I say those things? Probably because of a sense of vulnerability that seems to include for myself. Possibly because of a worry of how it might be taken. Perhaps because of a lack of time.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have some sort of occasion, some sort of event, that seemed actually to encourage such things?” I thought. And thinking back to my seven years of teaching in Poland, I realized such an occasion exists, just not in American culture.
In Poland, though, a tradition that invites such honesty has existed for centuries: sharing the opłatek.
I’ve done it for several years now, explaining it to the kids with a slide show and a bit of explanation about Christmas in Poland and substituting pizzelle from Aldi for the actual wafer.
This year, instead of just taking pictures, I participated. I always had a pizzelle in hand, but I waited for students to come to me; this year, I went to them. And told the shy kids who were coming out of their shell how exciting it was to watch them, to hear them assert themselves, to see the faces of other students as they share their often-striking ideas. I told the troubled students how much growth I’d already seen, how much I was rooting for them, how much it irritated me when I had to ask them to leave the classroom because their disruptive decisions were robbing others of opportunities. I told the kids who had started doing their work after a quarter, perhaps a quarter and a half of apathy, how proud I was of them.
And in return today, I got the loveliest Christmas card I have ever received from a student, thanking me for my words, thanking me for my encouragement and motivation, and assuring me that she was my favorite student.
Perhaps, but she’s tied with 120 others this year.
