Christmas Kickoff

No holiday season can officially start in our household until the annual viewing of Love, Actually is complete. This is a sacred ritual which requires some preparation (freshly-baked cookies and a bottle of wine) as well as a bit of pre-gaming (pulling out the tree, finding the ornaments, debating what should go where over a cup of hot chocolate.)

As I was massacring the butter and sugar in a plastic bowl, with the mini fake tree already positioned on its little Ikea end table, the boxes of ornaments lying open nearby, and the Narada Nutcracker playing on my computer, I suddenly succumbed to a walloping wave of nostalgia for the wonderful Christmas seasons we had back home, in the snow-less, piney Pacific Northwest.

There are certain things without which it cannot really be Christmas - that very particular scent of the Christmas candles that stood in the little wreaths on the living room tables; trying to balance the fake pine garlands along the mantle-piece; the cloth nativity scene that went under the tree that we would spend hours playing with; the very 80s New Age Christmas albums blaring from the stereo; a million different versions of The Nutcracker; bowls of nuts on the table; making cream cheese cookies; hiding away in my bedroom working on Top Secret Christmas Present projects, usually involving dolls; the handmade cloth advent calendars; that elated feeling of coming home after school to play in your holiday-decorated house, knowing the winter break was starting soon.

The Christmas baking tradition

I was trying to impart the vital importance of this season and these memories to Piotrek over my efforts with the cookie dough and the electric mixer, which kept drowning out the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album that had popped up on YouTube. I had suddenly felt that we could not possibly inaugurate Christmas in our new house without not just a tree, but stockings, garlands, wreaths, the smell of baking cookies and the appropriately Christmasy (English) carols. And then the holiday itself - it should be noisy, joyful, with lots of people, children playing games, family from far and wide all coming together.

It should be joyful, children

A New Age Christmas with early 90s pizzaz

Did he get this excited about Christmas when he was little? He furrowed his brow and looked off into the middle distance. No, he decided. Not really. He remembered cleaning the house very thoroughly (a Polish tradition I have not yet adopted), waxing the floors, beating the carpets, etc, etc. He remembered the house being far too full, with all the aunts and cousins squeezing in and creating noisy chaos.

And by the way, he asked, what exactly is this we're listening to? The disco version of Christmas carols?

So, upon careful listening, maybe Mannheim Steamroller's Christmas album is a bit corny, silly and, well, rubbish. But it's the nostalgia that counts.

Now, part of the great holiday tradition was always having Polish wigilia on Christmas Eve. It was our special family thing and we stuck to it, even though it took me years to start liking some of the food (yes, there was a time in my life when I didn't even like pierogi ruskie, if it can be believed!)

Sitting down to eat Polish food - it's tradition!

But some of the magic of Christmas was wrapped up in that nauseating boiled-beet smell that heralded the real start of Christmas Eve. Even growing up mostly non-Polish in the US, I could never quite grasp that same feeling of Christmas in any of the other traditions - the plum pudding and paper hats and Christmas crackers and roast Turkey, the Santa and snowflakes and carrots for the reindeer, were all just charming accoutrements to the whole wigilia thing.

From my first Christmas in Poland - the market!

Which is why spending Christmases in Poland seemed like such a lovely idea when I first moved over here. This, I heard repeated over and over all around me, and felt in the prickly cold air, was a country that really did Christmas well. There's a great big Christmas market that takes over the old town square, with handmade crafts and sugared nuts and grilled meats and people sipping spiced wine from plastic cups. There are skating rinks and glittering Christmas trees, and folk troupes and pageants acted out on little stages. There are lights on all the lampposts and huge glistening angels at all the intersections. Sometimes there's even snow.

And it's one of the biggest yearly celebrations in a very Catholic country's very Catholic calendar. There's an air of solemnity which is only tinged with the mildest hint of commercialism, even in the shops and the decorations and the colourful stands and the great big barrels of mulled wine.

Polish Christmas in action

But despite all of this, I've found the "real" wigilia to be a bit of a let-down. Even if I had not come to rather like barszcz by the time I'd lived here for some years, I should have been excited to discover that it was not, in fact, the staple Christmas soup, giving way to the more palatable mushroom. But, in fact, I found that mushroom soup did not quite manage to taste like Christmas; that the absence of pickled herring on little mini rye squares was a glaring one; that carp will never be anything but disgusting, no matter how it's prepared, and could never equal our family's traditional Christmas salmon; and that nothing, NOTHING, can make up for the replacement of pierogi ruskie with the pathetic, unsatisfying cabbage-and-mushroom variety that is normally served at the wigilia table.

Making pierogi ruskie - a yearly ceremony

(It was one of my more exciting discoveries, on my first trip to Poland, that pierogi ruskie are, in fact, not a special Christmas dish that is painstakingly handmade once a year with great pomp and fuss, but in fact a staple of your standard weekly diet, which can be ordered in any restaurant on any day of the year. It was one of the most magical discoveries of my life.)

After trying to convince myself for the past several years that the holidays were lovely and I always looked forward to them, I eventually admitted that I found them to be kind of a drag. (I know - oh woe is me.) After a childhood of overly noisy gatherings, it seems Piotrek and his family have gone in the opposite direction, and spend every year on their little lonesome, with the immediate family and no more - the same five people who normally see each other over the same dining table each week, dressed slightly more elegantly and eating slightly more food than normal while talking of the same old things in a slightly more formal, self-conscious manner. After a while, I became an all-out grinch and started disliking holidays altogether. (I do not, for the record, dislike birthdays, name days or ordinary Sunday lunches with these same people. Just holidays.)

Happy and silly and in a jolly mood

I suppose this shouldn't be a surprise - nothing adds magic like taking something out of context. Our family's wigilia was a creation all its own, a tradition we created ourselves year by year. Ultimately, what made our wigilia so special was probably just the fact that it was ours. We hung out with family, we ate too much good (albeit somewhat unusual) food, we listened to festive (albeit somewhat cheesy) Christmas music, we played with the cousins and the uncles and the aunts, and everyone was happy and silly and in an unusually jolly mood. That's what I miss about Christmas.

So the gist of this rambling post and the rambling thoughts that created it is: the essence of the Christmas spirit is making up your own traditions and sticking to them, so that as the years pass, your festive glow will be awakened with Pavlovian regularity as the various Christmas stimuli are presented.

Doing Christmas as best I can

So for us that will be disco carols, chocolate chip cookies, proper Galician mulled wine (or any wine will do, really) and Love, Actually on the laptop.

Stringing up lights, hanging garlands, butchering attempts at handmade gifts, patting cream cheese cookies into questionable shapes sans cookie press, dancing to The Nutcracker, and listening to those classic English carols, with wonderfully atmospheric medieval-sounding instruments, while reading Polar Express or A Christmas Carol or The Night Before Christmas, will be the next family traditions to introduce.

And mini trees. We've been rocking the mini trees. 

On the Cold Front

The cold weather has come at last. It's below freezing and the wind is high - feels like -15C, they say. Munchkin and I are ensconced in the bedroom upstairs, with the electric heater nearby and the wood fire burning in the living room for good measure. The water is like ice and the bathroom will soon double as a second fridge.

Both Munchkin and I have come down with colds. For Munchkin that's a real first, and for us, a fun new adventure in baby cold treatments. We have come to master the nasal aspirator and the great strength of lung required to operate it. Even Munckin has stopped trying to escape by tunneling backward into the mattress whenever we pull it out, and simply stares at us with pained resignation. 

We put droplets in her nose and position her upright in her bouncy seat, despite her best attempts to backflip herself off with the leverage of two very determined feet. And we have invested in a nebulizer, which we use to coax saline mist up her nostrils and rescue her from the awful torture of trying to breathe through her mouth. 

Munchkin's torture device

Our nebulizer is shaped like a cow with a tube coming out the side of its head. It comes with cheerfully teal-coloured gas mask attachments in two sizes, as well as an infant attachment with the mist-dispensing opening built into a pacifier. As I write, Munchkin is busy pulling the pacifier attachment out of her mouth, waving it around, and putting it back in again. 

Besides putting everything in her mouth - mostly different parts of my face - another new habit of Munchkin is to hold gentle, murmuring conversations with different pieces of furniture. Just now, post-nebulization, she is telling a long, slow story to the lamp, with one thumb in her mouth. At any rate, it's distracting her from trying to catapult herself out of the bouncy seat. 

And as of about two weeks ago, she is officially a roller, although we've only seen her in action two or three times. She has successfully got herself from her tummy onto her back with great surprise and perplonkiness. She is also now no longer quite so terrified of being on her tummy, and has hung out there quite contentedly many times. 

And her new favourite word is "ma-ma-maaaaaaaa". She says this while tugging on my sleeve, grabbing my hand or pulling my hair to get my attention. She also says it while tugging on the blanket, grabbing her rattle or pulling on her mobile - but hey, it counts. She also says "a-woom", "lahh", "beeeh" and "neee", and several other sounds that are somewhat glottal and resemble the consonants of an exotic language I can't quite place. 

And she has learned sharing, since she gave me her cold without even being prompted. Very advanced indeed. 

On the cold front, we've had the yellow gas box installed in front of our property - some digging machines dropped by last week to set it up with minimal noise and fuss. A guy came on Saturday to survey our indoor pipes, and it looks like they'll be coming back tomorrow to do some work in the bathroom, where the boiler will be installed. 

So it may not be too long after all before we stop spending our days camping out in the bedroom, watching movies and reading books and playing on the play mat, and start paying real grown-up gas bills in return for a moderately warm house. It will be the end of an era, almost a way of life, for us to have a warm home, where we don't need to scuttle from frigid room to frigid room in layers of fleece and woolly hats, or to perform all household activities under blankets.

It's cold out there!

However, for as long as Munckin and I are recovering from our cold, movies and books and snuggles and lots of naps will be the ongoing game plan.