fun in threes, sometimes fours
polska
My always obsession...
Thank God for loving Babcias who send entire boxes of educational materials from Poland so that little granddaughters around the world can work on their Polish language skills.
Thank God for loving Polish mamas who daily work with stubborn half-Polish little girls in an effort to keep them bilingual.
Immigrants bring all sorts of things with them when they move to a new country. They bring items of their culture: language, songs, recipes.
They bring a love of native-language literature (even if it's actually translated from another tongue) that excites them beyond words when they find someone else who seems to love a given book as much as they do.
But one thing they must leave behind is the confectionery that brings a smile to their faces and warmth to their hearts.
I've always been fascinated by children of mixed culture, children who speak language X at home (Spanish, Hindi, German, you name it) and English everywhere else. Attempting to raise just such a child has shown me how difficult it can be.
The Girl understands Polish perfectly; she doesn't speak it unless highly motivated. Part of that is due to living in a mixed household: I don't always speak Polish around the house. ("Always?!" K would ask incredulously. "How about rarely?") Additionally, the Girl spends her days in daycare with other English speakers. Polish is that language of babcia, dziadek, and her cousins.
"What you need to do is send her to Poland for the summer," an acquaintance at the swimming pool advised. "She's not too young!" the lady assured us over K's protests that it was a bit much to force on a four-and-a-half-year-old.
Days like today, though, help: Polish friends from Asheville came for a day visit. That made three little girls in the same situation: perfect understanding of spoken Polish who exhibit great reticence to speak it themselves.
The hope was that, the two friends, just back from Poland and spending every day with babcia for the last couple of weeks, would speak Polish with the Girl. But if siblings of immigrants speak English to each other (which they usually do), it was perhaps only wishful thinking to hope that the three would break into unrestrained Polish.
In the living room, however, it was a different matter altogether.
In and out ran the girls; English to Polish to English ran their conversation.
Perhaps there was improvement; perhaps not. Perhaps that's not the most important concern.
Poles around the world are celebrating today's beatification of Ioannes Paulus PP. II, born Karol Wojtyła and known to most of us as John Paul II. As with his death, most wanted a commemoration that would please John Paul II.
Poles in the Greenville area celebrated with an outdoor Mass and picnic.
With some free advertising from a Polish-owned market in the Charlotte area, probably two hundred people Poles from South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia gathered in a park outside Spartanburg. A cookout and impromptu soccer football match followed a Mass under a canopy of new leaves in celebration of a newly beatified Pole.
The Mass included a number of songs, anecdotes, and poems about John Paul II, including an encore performance of "Święty, Święty Uśmiechnięty," the song L sang for the Palm Sunday celebration a few weeks ago.
This time, she had a backing choir and a boom operator.
After Mass, everyone did what Poles do best: converse and share food.
There were piles of sausages, bowls of chips, salads of all descriptions, and a table of deserts, and though it was intended to be a "feed your own family" picnic plan, everyone ranged among the groups, sharing food and laughter (among other things).
The children played
the adults talked,
and the priest played soccer football.
Family, sports, dancing, laughing, and Mass --
JPII was certainly smiling.
The preparations for a Polish Easter are impressive: hours of cooking, something like 300,000 square inches of cleaning (floors, walls, doors, cabinets, etc.), dozens of eggs for painting, hundreds of baskets for blessing.
There are some greater pleasures among all these, though. And even in the drudgery, one can find some kind of meaning.
Though my mother would faint to read it, there is something inherently satisfying about cleaning. Though it’s only a temporary effect — for dirt holds sway in our world — it’s somehow an apt metaphor of life, taming the chaos and finding beauty under ugliness.
It’s not as difficult to find meaning in cooking as in cleaning, nor is it as difficult to find pleasure. As Cooking is tiring but rewarding. As Tiana’s father in The Princess and the Frog says,
You know the thing about good food? It brings folks together from all walks of life. It warms them right up and it puts little smiles on their faces.
Cooking is inherently a social activity because food is social.
And of course it’s a pleasure to paint eggs; it’s even more a pleasure to watch your daughter paint.
The yearly painting serves as a metric of development: the designs become more intricate and more precise. With her artistic tendencies, she’ll soon be creating eggs that put mine to shame.
The blessing, too, is a blessing. It’s an imported tradition, with the parish priest, Father Theo — himself a transplant from Columbia — pressed into service several years ago, not knowing the tradition. Each year, Fr. Theo has become more involved, more enthusiastic.
The first year, he breezed in, not knowing the significance of the tradition, and offered a quick blessing for the handful of Poles who were there. This year, there were songs, prayers, and even jokes — Fr. Theo can’t go for awfully long without smiling.
Yesterday was Tłusty Czwartek, "Fat Thursday." In Poland, it's traditionally a time for pączki, doughnuts. "Ile pączków zjedliście?" asked a friend in Poland of his Facebook friends. How many doughnuts did we eat? On Thursday we ate none. Dunkin Dounuts and Krispy Kreme don't count. They're doughnuts, not pączki. Traditionally filled with rose petal jam, Polish pączki really look, smell, and taste nothing like what we usually get in the South.
And then K discovered that Publix -- of all places -- sells "Original Pączki."
They're filled with raspberry jam instead of the ineffably good rose jam, and there's something not quite right about the consistency of the crust, but they're an acceptable substitute for a mid-sized Southern town.
L had one for dinner. "It's time she learned what 'Fat Thursday' is all about," proclaimed K. For her part, L was less interested in the doughnut than the filling, which she fingered out and declared to be delicious.
The food is prepared. The guests have arrived. The table is set. It’s time for the most-anticipated evening of the year: Wigilia, the traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner.
It’s the thirteenth time — seven in Poland, six in the States with K — that I’ve experienced what has become the highlight of the year.
We exchange the opłatek, sharing wishes for the coming year. Variations of “May this coming year be better than this closing year,” the eternal hope of humanity, echo through the kitchen.
We begin the parade of food: two soups, dumplings stuffed with cabbage and mushrooms, fish, salads, rice, desert after desert. Tradition dictates repetition, and the menu is no different. We have the same soups every year: barszcz z uszkami (borscht with dumplings) and wild mushroom soup. We have salmon as the main fish course, this year stuffed with crab meat.
The appeal of tradition, though, is that you know what’s coming. There are no surprises. We’re comforted in the knowledge that at least this one thing has not changed, for change isn’t always positive. So while we play with the idea of switching the menu — maybe having a different fish — we always end up following tradition.
After dinner, we open gifts. When I hear about some people’s expectations for Christmas presents (suggestions to buy $2,000 rings, piles of clothes, multiple video games), I wonder what’s the point. Such a Christmas is spoiled if one doesn’t get one’s material lusts satisfied.
I often wonder how many people have such materialistic, shallow Christmas experiences: getting gifts, then retreating into solitude to play with the toys. It’s as if they’ve forsaken the real treasure of Christmas for silly trinkets.
The real treasure is family and friends gathering together to share some laughs and companionship.
