Christmas II: This Time It's Ukrainian

We completed our annual round of Family Christmases this past weekend in style, with a day of good food, good company, and a fair bit of driving because this is America and that’s just how we roll.

There was much baking in the run-up to this, of course. There always is. Kim made bread and a poppyseed cake, and I figured out why my pizzelles were coming out too thick and fixed that so this batch of pizzelles was nice and crisp. Pizzelles are my entry ticket to this otherwise Ukrainian festival. I’m the DEI baker that way. There is a certain “coals to Newcastle” quality about bringing all of this food along with us, but in a tasty way.

We arrived not long before dinner, and there was much preparation in the works. Many cookies. Borscht. Sausages. Pierogies. Halupchi. Potato pancakes. And so on. If a sudden blizzard were to strand us there, we’d have been in good shape. We might not have even noticed. Honestly, we might have cheered.

There was a certain amount of hanging out while everyone filtered in. Naturally we – being the furthest away – arrived first, because that’s how it always is with any group. You have to plan ahead when you live a bit away and take into account possible delays along the route. When you’re right there, you can just roll out and head on over. But the hanging out is the point, really – holidays are meant for gatherings and conversations.

And eating. There is always the eating part. That’s important too.

We are professionals that way, and we endeavored to live up to those standards. You can’t get everyone around the same table for these holidays so there were two tables and even then there was a certain amount of hot-seating as people finished and got up and were replaced by other people. It is a constant swirl of motion with new seatmates to talk with on a regular basis. It keeps things interesting.

There are enough small people on this side of the family that we still do the traditional Christmas gift time, though it’s a fairly informal thing. When enough people have finished eating and the little ones can wait no more the gifts come out and then there is a Festival Of Unwrapping And Exclamations and all is right with the world.

Of course, for the rest of us there is the Dice Game, a tradition on both sides of my family now. In the wake of last year’s results we implemented a new rule for this year: no kitchen items. It was mostly obeyed, which meant that there was a wider variety of things in the mix, the most fought over being a calendar of pictures of things found in nature that look like penises because who would object to that on their office wall? Nobody, that’s who.

The dice went around and around and eventually we all had our gifts. I don’t remember who ended up with the four-foot-tall Santa but I suspect we’ll see that again in a future year.

And so our Christmas is mostly done now. All we have left to do is our Christmas card, which might get out by Valentine’s Day this year if we focus on it. Might not. Never a bad time for a card, really.

To all a good night.