My French & Polish & English Christmas – Wigilia

This year my Christmas turned out to be very interesting & international, full of lovely silly presents and what comes behind it – loads of reasonable, savvy but such fun shopping! As well as this year Christmas was full of love, happiness, relax and international traditions and food combined. I do not even know where to start…ok so as I am Pole who lived in UK for some time and who ended up in France this year I had a good think on how to combine traditions this year to make all people happy…French & Polish & English

We have started with decorating the real Christmas tree. I had a great pleasure to help out with the big tree and was told many good stories about the ornaments which we hang on the tree. It looked amazing and had the love & happiness atmosphere.

Then I made my own Christmas cards for family and friends. I have baked and decorated the Polish Christams ginger cookies called Pierniczki. Each of my French friends got a nice gift made of them Polish Pierniczki Recipe.I loved wrapping the presents – each one has it own shape, color and ribbon so we ended up with so many little and big ones

under the tree and it took us the whole 25th of December to

unpack them! It was such a good fun!

On 24th Decemeber – on our Polish Christmas Eve called Wigilia, I started morning preparations to get ready for the evening meal. Thankfully we made Uszka & Pierogi few days earlier so this helped me a lot.

Early in the morning on Christmas Eve I made a big and smelly gingerbread caked called Piernik, It got a nice shape and was filled with the plum confiture and covered with a tasty chocolate. I have also decorated it – well maybe too much and i though this was my English influance as actually the decorations for cake came from the UK! The cake was really good and we kept eating it the whole Christmas and every day it actually tasted better and better…

But lets get back to the Wigilia – This was our Christmas Eve Menu

I made 2 soups – beetroot and mushroom one. We had Uszka and Pierogi, I made the sauercraft and Fish Bake and obviously there was Oplatek – the Polish Wafel.

I made all people gathered by the table, we broke the Oplatek and exchanged the wishes and started the meal…I need to admit that we went for the

compromises on here. I needed to allow the wine and bread to accompy the meal but I was againts English crackers this time…We didnt open the presents on 24th as it is in accordance with the Polish tradition but we kept the additional and empty seat for a lonely person who might seek the company and food that day.

 

We had an apperative the french way but we didnt have a cheese to finish the meal. We had a cake with an English twist which was a double cream on the side…

 

 

So that how the Polish & English & French Christmas started for me….

If you would like to learn more about Polish traditions have a look at this short booklet I made for my French friends. Hope you like it!

Get it here: Polish Christmas Traditions Booklet