Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

I’m so excited about my Polish Christmas! Tomorrow at 15.35 (3:25 p.m.), I board a train at Warsaw’s Centralna train station for Poznan Glowny, the city’s main train station. It arrives into Poznan at 18.17 (6:17 p.m.), where I’ll be met by my dear first cousin Grzegorz for what promises to be another magical Polish Christmas.

For Poles, the holiday is celebrated on December 24. After fasting all day, at dusk, when the first star is seen in the sky, Poles commence their Wigilia, a ritualized holiday meal in multiple courses. The table is beautifully decorated with candles and fine china over a crisp, white tablecloth, with a place set for an unknown visitor, the wandering traveler. Hay is covered over by cloth to represent Jesus’s birth in the manger. The meal commences with the breaking of the oplatek, a wafer embossed with a holy scene, from which a piece is broken off and passed to the next family member along with well wishes for the coming year (and forgiveness for any wrongs). The many courses include carp, soup, dumplings, barsch, noodles, beets.

After the meal comes Christmas caroling and, only then, gift exchange. It’s a lovely time of sharing, and the gifts are simple ones, of modest size. No more than one per person. Gifts I remember from the two previous Wigilia’s I’ve celebrated at Grzegorz’s are books, a scarf, a locket, gloves. Nothing ostentatious like a humongous new flat screen tv.

Then, after tea and sweets and sitting around sharing family stories and photographs from the past, we wait for the clock to creep toward midnight when the entire family pulls on their winter coats to go to midnight mass. The last Christmas I spent in Poznan with Henry four years ago was unseasonably cold, and walking the short distance from my cousin’s apartment to the church, I remember that my fingers and toes were frozen when we arrived. The church was packed with seemingly not a member of the community absent.

Though I miss my family in the United States (this year Henry flew back to spend the holiday with his father, grandmother and friends in North Carolina), I feel privileged to enjoy this special Christmas in Poland with close family. The train ride through snow-covered landscape, the music in the air, and lights in the windows will make their indelible twinkly impressions. My wish for Poland as the country grows and prospers is that its citizens hold onto their magical traditions and customs, that they never lose touch with the simplicity at the heart of the season.