Silent night, holy night...

After  weeks  full of work, responsibilities and concerns, Christmas becomes like a fresh sweet shower that has the main aim to fulfill our souls with positive energy, hope, love, trust and the power to go further, knowing that we have good support at every step (people that love and care about us). The beauty of this holiday is that it manages to gather families all together: members of the family that we haven`t seen for a long time, parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.  that makes us better, and more empathetic as well. 

This year, I decided to experience my first Christmas away from home, inside a wonderful Polish family from Warsaw, near whom I felt the power of love, solidarity and local Christmas traditions. I was very happy and touched when my friend Hanka invited me to spend this saint holiday with them (this happened some weeks before Christmas). At the beginning I thought that I would probably feel like an “intruder” during the evening (because I didn’t know all her family members, I had met only her mother once), but my friend’s family behaved with me as if I had been their member for a long time, I felt so comfortable and positive (especially when I spoke with the Hanka’s grandmothers, a fact that increased my hankering after my own grandparents and so I called them laterJ).

They put a lot of soul and passion in preparing the house and the table for this special event: there was a nicely decorated Christmas tree (with sweetsJ), there you could hear beautiful carols and smell good food.

Regarding their Christmas food I can say that we ate in that evening a lot, they had so many types of food like: barszcz z uszkami (a traditional red soup), bigos (cabbage and mushrooms), pierogi z grzybami i kapustą, filety z dorsza (cod fillets), śledź w oleju (herring in oil), szprotki (a kind of fish), sałatka warzywna (salad from vegetables), kompot z suszu (boiled fruits with water);  for sweets they prepared: makowiec, sernik, piernik, rafaello, pierniczki. I also prepared a Moldavian traditional food for Christmas – sarmale – J (it gave me lots of troubles, but in the end I managed to cook it).

This holy evening had many good surprises for everyone of us. You could feel the delight from far away, everyone was happy (even their cat and dog). Of course, I missed my family a lot in those moments, but I didn’t regret at all that I decided to taste this year from the Christmas Polish culture.  

PS: Thank you very much Louis Phillippe.