We are just a few days away from Christmas Eve which has always been the centerpiece of the holiday in my family. Doug and I have decorated our beautiful tree, all decked out with ornaments that have been saved year over year and very carefully stored. Wreaths are hanging inside and out, candles are buring and holiday music is playing.
I’m finished with my cookie baking. The menu this year consists of pecan crescents, pecan coins, Bedah’s ginger cookies (from Doug’s grandmother), sugar cutouts and a cream cheese cookie – some call it kiffel or kipfel or kolaches. It is a square of cream cheese dough with a dab of a mixture of apricot and chopped walnuts with two of the four ends pulled together. All of these cookies (except Bedah’s) have been prepared by my grandmother and mother as far back as I can remember and are baked only once a year.
My Christmas memories are mostly focused on Christmas Eve, a holiday the Lithuanians, and most eastern Europeans celebrate as the “big” day when we opened present from anyone except Santa. Christmas Morning brought the cache left by Santa, followed by an early dinner, usually of roasted turkey with all the typical sides with cookies and graham cracker cake with cream cheese icing for dessert.
On Christmas Eve everyone got dressed up in their best clothes: the men in suits and the women in pretty cocktail dresses. One year in particular – I think I was about nine years old – my mother bought new dresses for my sisters and me and I really thought the dress was the epitome of all dresses. Blue, with a rainbow hue, of silk taffeta with a full skirt (puffed out by a crinoline), it was a shirtwaist style with a self belt and little cap sleeves, but the piece de resistance was the little circle of real mink around the collarless neckline. It was heaven and topped off with white socks with lace edges and black maryjanes I was so tres chic. I will never forget that dress!
The dinner table was always covered with a white cloth and we started the meal by my Grandfather, Waclovas, breaking a rectangular piece of special holy bread and passing it around the table – oldest to youngest with the biggest piece for the youngest – my sister Susan. Our meal consisted of Mushroom barley sour cream soup, homemade pierogi, cucumber and vinegar salad, smelts covered with a breadcrumb crust and sauteed in butter. Stewed fruit, still warm in a chafing dish, consisted of prunes, apricots, pears and apples and of course the cookies. Poppyseed is a very important ingredient in the family’s ethnic background with desserts of makoweic (poppyseed roll) and paczki (poppyseed donuts). Both were homemade and today, I can’t quite imagine how one deep fries and fills donuts right before a completely homemade dinner. I don’t make the donuts and I buy the makoweic from a local polish bakery but I can still see both laid out on a triple tier dish and sprinkled with powdered sugar.
Initially after my Grandmother’s passing, my Aunt Amelia hosted Christmas Eve – she and my mother did all the cooking while my two cousins along with my sisters and me prepared a Christmas Concert for the entire family. The boys played the piano and the violin and we sang and sang while my father recorded the whole thing on his tape recorder which was a very large box that had two spinning reels of brown tape collecting the performance. (He also recorded among other things, the performance of the Beatles their first time on the Ed Sullivan Show).
The women always had Christmas brooches on their dresses and or their coats – and sometimes a Christmas corsage made of a sprig of holly or pine, a few tiny christmas balls and/or bells and frosted with snow or sparkles. And one Christmas Eve, my Aunt Amelia and Uncle Henry danced the Peabody Two Step in their living room to “I’ll be home for Christmas”. With the tree lights twinkling, we all sat in awe as they glided around the room. What a lovely gift to all of us on Christmas Eve.
We continued the Christmas Eve tradition at my Mother’s home and after her passing, my sister Marge hosted an I helped cook. As the years have passed, we have split off on holidays because of our geographic locations of our chidren and their growing families.
I held many Christmas Eve’s in Tampa with about fifty friends waiting for the pierogi made only on this ocassion. When Doug and I moved to Austin, we didn’t change the menu and our Texas neighbors loved it and when we were transferred to New York, we decided that since it was just the two of us (with a very small kitchen), we would go out to dinner on Christmas Eve. Sad as I was about missing the traditional meal, I was very happy to see that our favorite neighborhood restaurant – Antonucci – was packed with happy and hungry patrons, all about our age, glad they didn’t need to cook!
Last year, our first Christmas in Sarasota, where I am blessed with a big, beautiful kitchen, I invited several friends and neighbors for the tranditional dinner. A few had not ever had an ethnic meal, and we had leftovers – for the first time in my holiday cooking career. This year, I will make the meal for a very small group – Doug’s brother Joe and his wife Mary, and of course our longtime friend, Pat. It will be intimate but special as it will be that wonderful and traditional Christmas Eve I have experienced so many times.
I was brought up in a home where food was everything – and to serve special things on special holidays – especially Christmas – was very important. Cooking and baking for others is so very gratifying there isn’t a way to explain, unless you grew up in this environment.
But most of all, the cooking and baking was in preparation not only for the family but in celebration of the anticipation of the coming of the Christ child. Midnight Mass always followed the Christmas Eve Dinner and although not many people follow this tradition today, Lithuanians always set a place for the unknown but anticipted guest. Lighting votive candles in little paper bags up the walk of our front door is a wonderful tradition to “light the way” that there is room at our Inn.
From the beautiful Paradise of Sarasota, Doug and I wish you the most wonderful Merry Chritmas and Happy New Year! Let the Season Begin!
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Paradise Found 