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.