Polish Christmas always means Wigilia (Christmas Eve) with all it’s traditions. Imagine a warm living room at home, with a green, beautifully decorated Christmas tree, a family table with an impeccable white tablecloth on it, with candles lit and hay under the cloth to remind us about Bethlehem’s little shed: Jesus had no cradle, Nor a downy pillow, So in a small crib Mary placed Him, On hay, soft and mellow (so reads an old Polish Christmas carol). Wigilia is always the most solemn day of the year, a day of peace and family reunion, a day of forgiving and of good wishes shared with everyone we love, when oplatek (a thin wafer) is broken and shared with every person present at home. Wigilia comes from a Latin word vigiliare, which means to watch. That evening everybody looks through the window for the first star appearing in the sky. When the weather is fine, frosty, and the ground is covered by snow, then it’s easy to find the first star. Otherwise, we have to imagine it has appeared and it’s time to sit down for Wigilia supper.

On Christmas Eve meat is excluded from the menu. The number of dishes is also bound by tradition: five, seven, nine, eleven or thirteen (but there’s also a different count: 12 dishes for twelve prosperous months of the coming year). One plate at the table is always left for the dead relative, or for an unexpected guest, to be invited to join the family at the holiday meal. Supper starts with a mushroom soup or red beet soup (borsch) with little dumplings stuffed with ground mushrooms and spices. Then follows sauerkraut with mushrooms, pierogi (dough rolls) filled with mushrooms, potatoes or cheese and noodles with poppy seed. Next is fish, marinated, fried or broiled. Carp is prefered: fried or cold in aspic. But also pickled herring is served, in vegetable oil or in sour cream, with chopped onions and spices. Dessert usually consists of poppy seed with honey, nuts and raisins (kutya), dried fruit compote, gingerbread cookies or cakes. Alcoholic beverages are also available: wine or krupnik (a Polish homemade holiday brandy made out of honey, spices and alcohol). In every Polish household there is a favorite Christmas Eve dish – a specialty of the family, sometimes made according to recipes several hundred years old.

After supper, candles are lit on the Christmas tree and children fish for gifts hidden under the lowest branches. The tree is usually green spruce or fir, cut in the forest. But more and more often now, Polish urban families buy artificial trees, and candles are replaced by garlands of electric lights. Playing music and caroling add to a warm and gay family reunion on Christmas Eve. But this ends before midnight. At midnight, everybody but infants and the sick attend a midnight Mass. After a sermon, the whole congregation sings koledy (Christmas carols), and on the way back people visit the homes of relatives and neighbors. This old tradition survives only in villages, because city life poses too many obstacles to the night-time visits.

Christmas Eve in Poland (and in Polish homes everywhere) is a lovely tradition, allowing for warm personal relations and, sometimes, unusual customs to be observed. When cleaning fish for supper, Polish housemasters keep some of the scales to put in a wallet. That brings wealth to the household. Also straw, put under the tablecloth, will bring prosperity. At midnight, animals at home and on the farm are supposed to speak (but it’s bad luck to overhear them!). Do not lend anything on Christmas Eve, or it will be missing all year. Wigilia is also considered a link between the living and the dead. Thus, blow on your chair when sitting down to supper, otherwise you might sit on a ghost that came to join you. These are only a few examples of dozens of Christmas Eve customs, which are usually related to weather, health, marriage, birth and death.

But in the Polish Christian families, Christmas Eve is a holy time of waiting for Jesus to be born. As it is said in the carol:

Angels from heaven sang a thrilling psalm,

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Ten years ago in France, eight days before Christmas Eve, I fell from a rock, breaking my back. It happened near the small village of Rocquefort des Corbieres, in wineyard country near the Mediterranean Sea. The weather was still warm and mild and both Sophie and I were longing for a Polish “White Christmas”, with a fir tree and the traditional dishes. A year before, we took a night train from Geneva to Paris to arrive on December 24, just before Christmas. It was raining when we went out to shop for fish and other foods for supper. Then, in a small Paris apartment, my wife cooked the traditional Polish meal out of what had been left for us by our relative and what we could buy in the nearby market. It was a lovely Wigilia after all. And then, the accident. Before Christmas Eve, I had been operated on in Perpignan and I had to lay flat on my back. Sophie stayed in Roquefort alone. But, after all, it was a memorable Christmas Eve for both of us. I had saved my life and laid in the hospital safe and well cared for. Sophie enjoyed unexpected help from the local people, who bought and cooked food for her and invited her to share the Eve’s supper with them. When she kindly refused because of my accident, they brought in all the things to her house, and one elderly man offered her a small cat (so that she wouldn’t feel alone on the Holy Night).

That year, in the south of France, far from our Polish home, we could feel the blessings of Christmas so real, as never before. And the friendships from that time still continue.

Mariusz Dawid Dastych

The Pope on Wigilia:

Polish Christmas Traditions:

Polish Christmas in the Polar Regions: