Longing For Christmas Past

I remember when I was ten years old. Christmas seemed so much more intimate, so steeped in tradition and family. There were the many activities and events that led up to the Christmas Holiday, like going to church during advent, and watching as one by one, the four advent candles were lit. I remember going to sit on Santa’s lap at the volunteer fire hall just down the road from our house in Wilpen, P.A., and then, days later, writing that last minute letter to Santa Claus to ask for any important gifts I’d forgotten to ask for when I sat on his knee. Back in those days, I gave the letter to my mom and dad who promised to check it for spelling errors, (wow… was I ever gullible!), then they’d take me into town to drop off the letter in the huge “letters for Santa” mailbox in front of the town hall on the Ligonier Diamond.

I also vividly remember all pre-holiday baking that got done a day or two before Christmas Eve. I remember watching as Grandma would mix together rice and beef, boil cabbage heads to loosen and separate the leaves, then roll out casserole after casserole full of halupki. She would then mix together batch after batch of yeasty dough to roll out on the counter into long sheets which she would then fill and roll into kolacky rolls. I remember her whole house would smell of the heady aroma of bakery goods for hours, almost days after she baked.

Those are just a few of the many memorable little details that made the time leading up to the big two day Christmas holiday magical all unto itself. Why do I call it a two-day holiday? Well, because I'm Slovak-American and Christmas Eve is just as much a holiday to us Slovak-Americans as is Christmas Day.

Christmas Eve started early for me back then, and by early, I mean it started off really, really early! At some point just as the barest hint of dawn began to lighten the dark winter sky in the east, Dad would wake me up and help my clumsy, still half-asleep little body get dressed in all my heavy winter clothes. He would then push me out the back door of the house so that I could start the day off by fulfilling an old Slovak Christmas Eve tradition. Let me explain the concept behind the tradition here so that you can gain a better understanding about why anyone would wake a young kid up, throw some clothes on him and toss him out of the house into the pre-dawn chill of Christmas Eve morning.

The old Slovak tradition of “vins” dictates that a young man or shepherd would call from house-to-house making his Christmas wish or "vins" to all in the household:

On this glorious feast of the birthday of Christ our Lord,
I wish you from God, good health, happiness and abundant blessings.
May it be yours to enjoy comfort from your children,
salvation for your soul, the kingdom of heaven after death,
and for the family's welfare, may you have whatever you ask of God.

Vesele Vianoce a Stastlivy Novy Rok -- Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Now the tradition that my family and most of my neighborhood prescribed to, however, had changed slightly, altering through either some odd Americanization of the original Slovak tradition or just from the lunacy of the old Slovak ladies in my neighborhood. The newly modified, updated tradition of my neighborhood stood thusly, "Young Slovak-American males are to be awoken in the wee hours of Christmas Eve morning, dressed warmly and tossed outside into the biting cold of the Western Pennsylvania wintertime where they are expected to take on the role of the “shepherd” traversing the neighborhood knocking on the doors of their Slovak-American neighbors (read as the aforementioned loony old Slovak ladies) and wishing them a "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"

Did you happen to note the "Slovak males" part of the tradition? It's there for a reason, let me assure you. It is considered the height of bad luck for a woman to be the first person to come to your house on Christmas Eve. (I mean it's that kind of terrible “breaking a mirror while holding an umbrella open inside the house while walking under a ladder all at the same time” kind of bad luck!)
Sounds kind of sexist, doesn’t it? Well yeah. It is sexist, but hey, it's tradition! My grandmother is famed to have screamed at my mother through her kitchen window one Christmas Eve morning that she wouldn't let her into the house until a man could come to do the Christmas Eve blessing.

Of course, it’s not as not as if there isn’t any benefit in this for the young Slovak-American males as they fend of a sure bout of hypothermia schlepping all over the hell’s half-acre upholding this tradition. The old ladies in the neighborhood really took this blessing stuff seriously, and were more than happy to make with the cash handouts. A speedy route of a neighborhood like mine could net about $20 or $30, which, back in those days, to a ten year old, was a pretty good haul.

After that, the day went on fairly uneventfully. Christmas Eve is a day of fasting for Slovaks, so after I finished my freezing pre-dawn tour of the neighborhood, I’d head home and then hang around with my family as we would continue our fasting and preparing for the traditional Christmas Eve supper that was held at my Grandma's house. Around about 4 or 5 PM, we'd all walk up to her house and start getting ready for the "meatless dinner" that was traditional for a Slovak Christmas Eve celebration. The meal would consist of fish, usually highly breaded baked crispy fish sticks that bore absolutely no resemblance to fish. Getting my sisters and I to willingly eat fish when we were kids was only slightly easier than teaching a herd of elephants how to pirouette gracefully. Also on the evening’s menu were pierogies, peas, beets, stewed prunes, mashed potatoes, and brown sauerkraut gravy. There would also be kolacky, the Slovak pastry rolls my grandma usually made a day or two before, with different fillings such as ground walnuts, apricot, poppyseed, prune butter or pineapple.

At the start of the meal, each family member would be given a piece of Oplatki. Oplatki is a thin rectangle of unleavened bread that can come either in white or in various pastel colors. It usually is pressed into a mold when it’s made so that the side is embossed with a intricate and beautiful Christmas scene. The Oplatki is served with honey at the beginning of the meal along with a blessing. My grandmother would always do this blessing and I think that this, above all, was the main reason that she was so beloved by all the dogs that we had owned during my childhood. She would take some of the food, usually a spoonful of peas and throw them over her shoulder as the blessing or offering for "the birds and the animals of the forest." Apparently, our two dogs, Porky and Ebony qualified as the aforementioned “birds and animals of the forest" and they usually waited behind her like black and tan shadows, sucking up the fallen food like little 4-legged vacuum cleaners.

After dinner, we would go into Grandma's living room and open our Christmas presents. Now, there are Christmas purists that say you should wait until Christmas Day to open presents, but our family usually got "church clothes" for Christmas and opening them early on Christmas Eve ensured that we'd be wearing them later on for Midnight mass. After presents were opened at Grandma's house, we'd head back down the hill to our house (we lived next door to Grandma in those days) and go to bed to get in a nap so that we would be awake and alert at midnight mass.

Around about 10 o'clock in the evening, Dad would go off and start getting ready for midnight mass. Mom would hustle us into our rooms and get my sisters and I started on getting into our clothes for church. About 11 o'clock, Dad would tell me to go and get my Grandma and I would go up to her house and walk her down the path to our house. We lived in Western PA and it was usually either icy or snowy at Christmastime, usually both. I escorted Grandma down the walk between our two houses under the glass half full pretense that, had she slipped, her holding on to me would stop her from falling. But let's face facts, I was a small kid at ten years old, and, had she fallen down, that old woman would certainly have taken me right down with her. Dad would go outside and brush the snow and ice off of the car, then heat it up and we'd be heading off to St. Anne's Church in Wilpen, PA, a little over a mile or so from our house.

St. Anne's is a beautiful little Catholic church way out in the country. It is built at the base of a very, very steep hill. I honestly never realized how steep it was until I was one of four pallbearers at my Grandma's funeral just a few years ago. I thought briefly I might be joining her in the grave after nearly having a heart attack getting her casket up to the the cemetery at the top of that steep hill. Aside from the hill, there's a nice graded cement sidewalk with three small flights of steps that runs from the gravel parking lot up to the back of the church, where the doors to enter are located. During the winter, and especially on Christmas Eve, when we arrived thirty minutes before mass, before anyone could come and salt this sidewalk down, this trek was always particularly treacherous. I can remember many times that I wound up slipping and falling on my butt on this slick stretch of concrete sidewalk.

We would aim to arrive at church by 11:30 PM, easily a half-hour or more early, so that Grandma could say her rosary. Not that you would ever want to, but if ever you wanted to get Grandma really good and angry with you, try getting her to church without her allotted thirty minute rosary and prayer time. She was definitely a woman who took her pre-mass prayer seriously.

Inside, the church had 2 sets of about 20 rows of pews separated by the wide aisle that ran down the middle of the church. Women and young children sat on the left, and men on the right. I am unsure if this really was tradition, or just Grandpa's clever way of getting away from Grandma for an hour or so. Since nearly all the old men and women sat on separate sides, I always just assumed it was yet another one of those Slovak/Catholic traditions. I remember the many times I’d sit next to my Grandma and listen to her and Mary Miney, one of her many church bingo buddies, say their rosaries. Those two old women were “power prayers”. They could zoom through a rosary so fast that all you'd hear were hisses from rapidly whispered S's in the “Hail Mary’s and “Our Father’s.”

One Christmas Eve mass that I remember very well, my mother had decided to come along with us to midnight Mass. Mom was Methodist and didn't usually come to our church so this made it an unusual Christmas Eve indeed. The mass started out in the usual way with the priest entering from the back of the church and swinging ‘round the frankincense censor with such vigor that, if had he’d misjudged the chain length even a little, he’d have taken out the people standing in their pews who were next to the center aisle. Once to the altar, the priest passed the still-smoking censor off to the nearest altar boy, turned and welcomed us all to the church, wished us a Merry Christmas and began the liturgical part of the mass. Mass went on fairly routinely until communion, and then it went South in a hurry. As the people began to line up down the aisle and the priest began to dole out the hosts to them, the choir decided that it would be a good time to have a violin and vocal rendition of Ave Maria. Unfortunately, due to either poor planning or utter tone deafness, no one had thought to tune the violin beforehand, and so it was completely off pitch. In addition to this, the violinist was apparently a novice or really out of practice and would squeak the bow across the strings every few notes or so.

As the squeaky off-key intro to the song played out, the ridiculousness of the entire situation overwhelmed me and I began to giggle uncontrollably. Usually in church, a swift elbow to the side from my Grandma would have stopped any errant giggling, as the Catholic mass back those days was certainly no place for irreverent amusement. However, on that unusual Christmas Eve, I wasn’t sitting next to Grandma, I was sitting next to Mom and she too was also trying hard to hold back her own giggles brought about by the awful, squeaky off-key playing.

As the intro ended, the choir leader Anna Thomas, an older lady who possessed an amazingly powerful and penetrating voice, began to sing… very loudly and, unfortunately, very off-key. Now whether she sang off-key by accident or on purpose so that she would be in tune with the off-key violin accompaniment I’ll probably never know, but it was at that point that my mother, my three sisters and I all dissolved into semi-silent laughter, pushing into each other; hissing and shaking with barely controlled mirth. My Grandmother was livid, glaring over at us from the other end of the pew as if silently hoping and praying that the God that killed Cain and squashed Sampson would get back to work on us for our making merry in His church on Christmas Eve. Mass ended shortly afterwards and, on the walk back to the car and during the entire car ride back to the house, we got long and rather stern lectured from Grandma about not being "simple" in the house of God.

Come to think of it, I was always really good at being “simple.” I am (or was) apparently naturally talented in that particular area. I'm pretty sure that, unless my younger cousin Matthew beat me out, my Grandma probably told me I was being “simple” more often than anyone else in my entire family.

When we got home, we would all get out of our church clothes, wash up and head off to bed. Christmas Day would see us getting up and having the big Christmas dinner at our house around two in the afternoon. After dinner, we'd all laze around and watch television, nap or play with our Christmas presents.

As I write this account and think back on all those happy memories, I find myself feeling somewhat sadly nostalgic for those long ago days. I can't help but mourn the loss of those long-held traditions that my family and indeed, our whole neighborhood, celebrated back in those days. I feel terribly sad for the next generation of my family, and of Slovak-Americans in general who will never experience that facet of their heritage because of our current generation's loss of the knowledge about, or downright indifference towards, all the old Slovak traditions we celebrated when we were growing up.

As odd as it may seem, I know that if I were offered the choice of a million dollars cash or the chance to go back in time, to be that ten-year old kid again and be able to re-live that one Christmas, I would choose the latter without even a second's hesitation.

To be able to once more experience Christmas with my family; to once more be awakened by my dad before the crack of dawn on Christmas Eve and get tossed outside into the cold to walk the neighborhood and bring good luck to the loony old Slovak ladies by bestowing holiday vins…

To once more be able to be in my grandmother’s house to smell the delicious odors of her baking all the old Slovak food, and then sit with my family at Grandma's table for Christmas Eve dinner and watch her throw the peas over her shoulder…

Or to once more take that hazardous trek to Midnight Mass at St. Anne's Church and listen to those old women speed through their rosaries and then laugh with my mom and my sisters at the squeaky violin playing and off-key singing during communion.

Yeah, that’d be worth a million bucks. Heck, I think it’d be worth that and a whole lot more!



Vesele Vianoce a Stastlivy Novy Rok!
(Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year!)