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First off: What's on your menu for Christmas/Christmas Eve?
We kinda started a new tradition last year. For Christmas Eve, My wife, daughter, Mother in Law and i will chow down on Steak, shrimp, pasta, pierogi, pie, and all sorts of other good stuff. The new tradition: My wife and I were both too tired last year to cook the lasagna, so my mother in law made the brilliant suggestion that we get Chinese. - Didn't hold back and even though there's only 4 of us, we went with the dinner for 8, comes with all the bonuses - soup, beef skewers, ribs, egg rolls. Oh yeah. Gonna keep that one going this year. -- Sorry Grandma.
Hard to believe it's that time of year again. My 15 year old asked me on the way home from school the other day about what Christmas was like when I was a kid. I thought about my grandparents, my grandmother especially. Right there in downtown Cleveland, Ohio City area. She mad Christmas feel like Christmas. Every Christmas Eve was spent at her house. House was dim lit, red decorations and garland on the walls. And I'll never forget her buffet - she'd put peanuts, chocolate covered pretzels, home-made cookies, kolachki, out for my 4 siblings and I and our 8 cousins to munch on while her and my aunts finished dinner. Forgive my spelling here... My grandparents were both born and raised in Poland. Before dinner, we would start with a blessing, my grandfather and later my grandmother would break off a piece of Holy Yost, walk around the table, and put in our mouths before the feast began. Dinner would start with borscht soup, then we'd pass around the pierogi - kids always went for the cheese and potato ones while the adults always went for the kraut filled or beef filled. After pierogis, we'd have fish. Catfish or perch depending on what my uncle Andy felt like cooking. - Man could he cook. You can imagine, we all filled up. Afterwards was grandma's cheesecake. Then the adults would force us to sing Christmas tunes followed up by gift opening.
The adults would then go to midnight mass. We'd all go home and get ready to spend Christmas Day together. Tradition. My grandmother wouldn't have it any other way.
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