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Wigilia 2024

Tuesday 24 December 2024

Going into Wigilia sick is no fun. K was ill during the 2011 Wigilia, and I had to make the barszcz as a result. It was probably not as good as K's.

Still worse than heading into Wigilia sick is going into it after an operation. The Girl's last Wigilia here as a full-time resident of our house and it was a struggle for her -- the whole day.

She stayed in her room for most of the day. "I'm saving my energy for tonight," she explained.

Evening came and she put some nice clothes on, came down stairs, and had dinner with us. After soup, she took a break in the living room, but she came back for the fish.

When it came time for the gifts, she lay on the couch and smiled as E passed out all the gifts she'd bought for everyone.

That was a bit of a role change: she's always been so thrilled to get the gifts (what kid isn't?), but tonight, she was more enjoying watching everyone else open her gifts.

The Girl is growing up. In fact, how long can we continue calling her "the Girl"? Isn't she legally an adult now? A woman?

But some things never change. Wigilia never changes. The same food every year. Perhaps a different fish -- trout this year. Or did we have trout last year as well?

And the same faces around the table, with one exception -- a new guest this year.

So if some things don't always change, if some things just stay the same seemingly forever, I guess the Girl can remain the Girl in our eyes indefinitely.

And what of the Boy this year? He retained his role as the gift distributor, but his voice is a little deeper now when he hands someone a gift.

But some things with the Boy don't change: he's still the most grateful gift-receiver.

Everyone, happy with their gifts, discussed whether to go to Mass tonight or tomorrow. They all decided on tomorrow, so we watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. The girls' pick. I hadn't seen it since I watched it in the theater, I don't think.

I checked the release date of the film: 1989. I was two years younger than the Girl is now. And like that, those thirty-five years disappeared.

The movie ended, and like that, yet another Wigilia was over. Everyone slowly went their own ways.

Another Wigilia.

Another little bit of perfection.

9 Years Ago

Wednesday 18 December 2024

Probably my favorite video with the Boy...

Tenderfoot

Tuesday 17 December 2024

2024 Christmas Concert

Thursday 12 December 2024

Monday Evening

Monday 09 December 2024

Will we ever be done with pierogi? Saturday, Sunday, and Monday -- three days of pierogi and uszki work. The upshot -- we have an entire freezer of Polish dumplings.

Our last batch was a distinctly non-Polish varietal: we had left-over turkey (not from Thanksgiving!) that we ground and mixed with mushrooms. They're good, just not very Polish. When we have them, I like to fry them just long enough to get a crispy finish and then make the lovely sauce you get with Chinese dumplings (soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil) and pretend we ordered out Chinese.

We closed the evening with a little math help. K does the math work with him; I do the English work.

Sunday Prep

Sunday 08 December 2024

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?

Saturday

Saturday 07 December 2024

Elf

Wednesday 04 December 2024

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.

The Elf

Mikołaj 2020

Decorating 2024

Sunday 01 December 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.