I have definitely been enjoying my new G10 camera and as a result came back from the Easter holiday with loads and loads and loads of photos. Just going through to select the good stuff, and then tag has been quite a chore… Can’t wait until someone invents something that would intelligently do all that labour for me.
Polish Easter like most of our holidays includes a lot of food, some typical for that time of the year and holiday occasion. One of these specialities is a desert called Mazurek - a small pastry topped with jam followed by toffee or chocolate and finished with things like nuts, almonds, etc.
I have a lot of email addresses. Plenty of accounts that I have accumulated over the years, by signing up to this or that service. For convenience reasons nowadays I actually forward practically all of them to my main gmail account (Yes, I am a bit of a Google fan-girl). This has various advantages - like for starters not having to remember a plethora of logins and passwords, however from time to time it can cause a major havoc.
And this is exactly what happened the other day. One of my Polish accounts suffered from configuration issues, which meant that a supposedly one way mailing list email, allowed any person to send a message to that address and it would have been delivered to quite a hefty amount of recipients.
What made it even worse was that it was not an active mailing group. It has been used for some survey purposes ages ago, and thus most users didn’t even know (myself included) that such a list existed. Once the information leaked out you can clearly imagine what had happened. In short spam was arriving long after the issue has actually been fixed…
But this is just a little background information. What I found fascinating is how the whole matter developed over time.
It all started with a single message asking if it is true, that if you send an email to ankieta@gazeta.pl it gets sent to all of its subscribers. Personally I thought it was just a single random spam, and I ignored it. Especially as for a while there was no response.
After some time several more messages popped-up, like shy little monsters poking their heads out of a hole. Most of these were simply “test” or “it’s really true!” emails.
Later the momentum quickly grew and the messages got less curious, and more offensive. Making fun of the admin or sending nasty messages about other mailing list users. Also this prompted more requests for someone investigating the issue, being removed from the list or just saying “hello, have a good day”.
Next finally came the messages with links. I was genuinely surprised how long it took for those to appear. At first the initial process was repeated. A few personal websites, some even with an apologetic note like “sorry for the spam, but this is just a too good occasion to be missed”. And I must say I even checked out some of the first links, and as such I can say they were not offensive or scamy.
Unfortunately this did not last long. And once the links started pouring through they quickly escalated to full blown spam, shop advertisments, etc. Often no message at all, just a link slapped in an email.
This in turn provoked a bigger number of pleads to the admins for fixing the issue or to remove the poor soul from the list, threats against the company breaking privacy laws and surprisingly quite a few humorous responses.
Amazingly some people just ignored all the junk and sent greetings to other anonymous users, or even personal ads. Which really does show that even faced with a disaster (yes, my finger still hurts from sieving through all those run-away messages and clicking delete…) people can still take life quite lightly and smile.
In Poland Christmas starts early. We celebrate something called Christmas Eve, which is a Catholic tradition that involves a very elaborate supper, though entails refraining from certain foods. The whole family gathers on the 24th of December to celebrate. These can often involve a great many of people including extended relatives.
Despite the Church renouncing the “no meat” rule, most people still consider it as tradition and in general if you are vegetarian you would feel at home. The day starts with a light breakfast and often nothing more until the evening, as it is supposed to be a fast. Some of the dishes would be prepared beforehand, while others are done during the course of the day.
Christmas table setting
There are different stories about the traditional number of dishes Christmas Eve should consist of - 6, 9 or 12, with the explanation for 12 being that it is the number of Apostles. However what Apostles have to do with the birth of Jesus is beyond me. When it comes to what the dishes are it can vary greatly based on the region.
My own family’s course choice seems to mix up several regions, however considering we live in Wielkopolska, its customs have probably influenced us the most. Also as for us Christmas is more of a tradition, and a cultural event, rather than a religious one, we do not really abide all the rules. Here is the list of our 12 courses:
Extra plate
One typical custom in Poland related to Christmas is leaving one extra setting at the table. The tradition states that any guest is welcome, and if someone knocks on our door you should welcome them in and sit them at your table and share your food with them.
Symbolically we are showing to be more hospitable than the people of Bethlehem. Unfortunately it is more of a symbol as a tv undercover survey has shown a couple of years ago. Most people they asked were not willing to guest a true stranger in their home.
So much for the hospitality I guess.
Polish Opłatek
Traditionally children are employed to stare through the frosty windows into the sky to spot the first star. This would mark a sign to begin Christmas Eve. Unfortunately often it would just be done in theory as a sky full of snow clouds prevents any stars from being seen.
Before everyone sits down to the meal we all share a symbolic “bread” called opłatek. Each person gets there own piece which they then go on to break with others while exchanging wishes of good luck and prosperity.
Our Christmas Eve favourites are Mushroom soup and Barszcz (beatroot soup). The later being a great match for pierogi (dumplings). Often my mother would also bake her own bread sticks with sesame or poppy seeds.
There are many ways to serve Barszcz, however in my house we use neither cream nor beans. This broth based soup is created by adding beetroot, marjoram, and a carefuly measured amount of vinager. The final product is similar in consistency to broth with the vegetables sieved out for use as filling for the dumplings.
Fried Carp
Most Poles cannot imagine a Christmas Eve without carp. British newspapers seem to love to exploit this fact to produce sensational news about immigrants fishing straight out of local ponds and rivers. It generally is a bizarre concept in the UK to eat fresh water fish.
However as I have a British survivor as my witness, yes, carp is not only edible, but quite nice when fried and served with bread and sauerkraut.
There is one downside though, you do need to watch out for the tiny bones as they are easy to choke on.
Pierogi
As mentioned before we do not adhere to the tradition a 100% and the more customary dumplings with sauerkraut and mushrooms have been swapped for meat filled ones. Pierogi do come in a myriad of varieties from cream cheese with salt or sugar, through fruit filled (commonly strawberries), or sauerkraut and mushrooms filled, to meat ones.
Our version is a handy way of getting rid of leftovers and utilising the stock from broth and barszcz. The filling is vegetables and different types of meat mixed into a pulp and then placed inside the dough for cooking.
Barszcz And Noodles With Poppy Seeds
Most Christmas Eve dishes are quite savory, however there is one exception. An old fashioned desert consists of noodles mixed together with poppy seeds and other ingredients such as in this year’s case: raisins, almonds, nuts, and orange peel. All this together makes for an intresting treat, standing out against the masses of chocolates available everywhere.
Christmas Compot
Secondly this Christmas we also had compot. The Christmas variation was based on dried fruit like plums, pears, apples, and cranberries. Served cold, this soup like drink again was not too sweet and sat well with the taste pallet of the rest of the supper.
Traditional Christmas Deserts
The three cakes rulling my family’s table every Christmas are: cheesecake, gingerbread cake and cookies, and poppyseed cake.
The first one is not really a seasonal thing. The cheesecake is more of a family tradition, as my grandmother makes the best one in the whole world. Because of that every time I come home I get treated to a delicious gift.
The other two cakes are a lot less of a personal preference and can be found in many more Polish homes during Christmas time.
Lots of Presents
As everywhere else in the world we do indulge ourselves in the gift giving tradition. Unlike the UK or the States however we open presents on the 24th of December just after supper. As my family has no small kids there wasn’t any Santa Claus visit, instead one of the younger members gets designated to hand out presents to everyone else.
Christmas sweets
Many of the gifts are various kinds of sweets, and the cakes mentioned above are served while people open their presents. Often gifted sweets are shared out among the guests together with the home made cakes.
In Poland people have not yet gone as far as in the USA when it comes to decorating their homes, however we do like to pretty things up. At my home we usually have many twigs and pine like decorations, including pine cones. Moreover there is an abundance of things like gold and red elements, stars, bows, bells, baubles and angels.
Window Christmas Decorations
As the table is the main focal point of Christmas Eve, the table obviously gets a lot of attention. In our case the table is just next to the big bay window, which is also a prominent feature in the living room.
White Christmas outside
Outside the house we also hang Christmas ornaments, again not as impressive as some of their American counterparts. However thanks to the lovely climate as you can see in the picture above we are often gifted with a stereotypical white Christmas.
