Wigilia: Poland's Christmas Eve Meal

           For generations, Polish families have gathered after nightfall on Christmas Eve around a table set not just for a meal, but for memory, forgiveness, and faith.  Wigilia is the meal that Poles have shared on Christmas Eve for generations, a tradition of Polish Catholic culture.  Let me tell you something about it.

          Unlike the Anglo-American world, Wigilia reflects the continental European accent on Christmas Eve as opposed to Christmas Day.  The family Christmas celebration begins that evening, and it begins with the Wigilia meal.

          It is a meatless meal because in former Catholic tradition, Christmas Eve was a fast day.  That’s not just Slavic anachronism: one finds similar traditions in a lot of European countries, e.g., the dominance in fish and seafood products, like clams and squid, in Italian Christmas Eve supper.  In that sense, Wigilia remains part of Advent: the word Wigilia itself means “vigil.”  But it leads into Christmas Midnight Mass, Pasterka.

          Because it is a vigil, it should start after dark.  That is why, in Polish tradition, the youngest child of the household waits to spy the first star of night.  His announcement of its appearance is the sign Wigilia should begin.  It alludes to the Star of Bethlehem.

          Wigilia begins with prayer, usually everyday prayers and a Bible reading about the birth of Christ.  Then, before sitting down to eat, the family shares oplatek.

          Oplatek is a wafer, often rectangular but in look and taste like a Communion host, usually blessed by the priest.  Members of the family break pieces from others’ oplatek wafer, simultaneously expressing words of forgiveness and wishes of good things for that other person.  Only when such greetings have been exchanged among all the family members do people then sit down to eat. 

          The oplatek alludes to the Eucharist and to the forgiving fraternal unity that should precede it.  It points to Midnight Mass.  (There is also a custom among Polish villagers to share some of the oplatek with their farm animals, upon whom the family depends and who, in that sense, are also part of the family.  As an allusion to their freedom, you’ll find lots of dogs in rural Poland unleashed on Christmas Eve.  There’s also a folk tradition that holds that, at midnight, the animals speak in human voices to each other as supposedly the inhabitants of the manger did millennia ago in Bethlehem).

          The actual Wigilia meal traditionally has twelve courses (commemorating the twelve Apostles).  They usually include a soup (beet soup or barszcz); cabbage rolls; pierogi; herring; carp; and desserts like poppy seed roll.  Not too long ago, it would not have been unusual, on visiting a Polish apartment in the days right before Christmas, to find a carp swimming in the bathtub.

          There will always be an empty place at the Wigilia table.  It has both a symbolic and practical meaning.  Symbolically, the space commemorates the faithful departed, those family members who once sat at the Wigilia with its current participants.  This is a practical expression of "the communion of saints."  Practically, the space is available for any wayfarer who might come one’s way: somebody poor, somebody alone, somebody far away from home. No one should be alone on Christmas Eve.

          Following the meal, families will typically join in singing Christmas carols and lighting the Christmas tree.  It is not necessarily a time for gift exchange, since this typically happened (for kids) on St. Nicholas Day (December 6), on Christmas Day itself, or on Epiphany (January 6).  That common celebration usually continues until the family goes to Midnight Mass. 

          Wigilia is very much a creative synthesis of Poland’s millennial Catholic heritage and its folk traditions.