Romanians know how to do it right. We celebrate three days for Easter and Christmas and about 6 of them for New Year’s. If it were up to us, we would spend 364 days in parties, drinking and carousing, and maybe one day in repentance. And no work at all. If it were up to us.
I have now lived in America for 27 years, but in my heart, I celebrate every holiday with the same spirit I grew up celebrating. So, regardless of what the American tradition calls for, Christmas is 3 days in my world. And isn’t it better to be able to say that you get not one but three days of doing nothing?!
I have always looked back to Christmases past when I have this “down time” and in some fashion I want to recreate, even if it’s just in my mind, the old days. Call it old-age melancholy, or missing those that are not around anymore, call it facing your mortality, whatever you want to call it, I have thought more about Christmases past, especially those we grew up in, my sister and I, than ever before this year.
And our Christmases were so randomly different during my 23 years growing up in Romania, that there is so much remembrance to draw from. We were lucky (I felt lucky when other kids might have felt cursed) to spend Christmases with different families. My mom’s parents did Christmas one way, and my parents a different way, and our relatives in the mountains celebrated in such an essentially different way than us city people that it made you wonder if we were celebrating the same holiday at all.
When we were little-little (think about before I went to school), we lived with mom’s parents. Grandma would take us to this park close to downtown to see the huge, 20+ ft wooden Santa put together by the city and surrounded by all sorts of kiddy rides. Nothing too dangerous because those machines would not be able to be erected just ad-hoc for a week or so around the holidays. They were small carousel-y type things. We were never allowed to be in the machines, as we could God forbid catch a cold. But it was good to walk in the cold of the evening (you had to go after nightfall, to see all the pretty lights glowing), and see all the people excited about their kids riding the rides, cheeks aflame with the winter chill. Then, we would go home and sometimes, would find our presents already under the tree, if this were Christmas Eve. In Romania we open the presents (and make the tree) on Christmas Eve.
We would then sit down to have Christmas Eve dinner - a lesser affair than the Christmas Day meal the following day, but still loaded with plenty of delicious, traditional foods. On Christmas Day, the close family members who also included my parents at that time, would get together and eat. Outside us kids, I don’t remember gift exchanges between adults being a thing in my childhood at all. It was all about the food and being together under one roof.
Christmas was a culmination of many weeks of work back then. For weeks before Christmas, all that people would talk about was where to get the best meat for sausages, the best flour for cozonac, the Romanian traditional holiday loaf, where to find the walnut for the loaf, where to buy a new table cloth or napkins. Back in Communist times, the stores were empty, and the main food groups (meat, flour, sugar, oil, even bread) were rationed, so people started stocking up early. That fever of preparedness was all part of “the season”, part of the tradition.
Cooking for Christmas would start about a week before Christmas Eve, with grandma kneading and raising the dough for the cozonac. This was by far the most laborious affair of the event. She would make enough loaves to give to everyone in the family which always puzzled me because everyone I knew made their own. But she was ever so proud of hers. You can look this up - anyone who has ever attempted making this beast of a loaf would tell you that it is really hard to master and have it come out right. Whenever grandma failed (by her standards, because by mine, her cozonac was always the absolute best), she blamed the flour. Grandma would clear out a whole day to cook nothing but the cozonac. She would hardly feed us on cozonac day. We had to scramble up a meal on our own with leftovers we would find in the fridge, which was not much because the fridge had to be empty for the Christmas cooking to come.
In the following days, she’d make all the other foods - the sarmale (cabbage and grape-leaf rolls), several kinds of roasted meats, appetizers of all sorts and of course, she would fry the pork sausages in the pan. One of the days before Christmas was also dedicated to a major house cleaning. That was the one day grandpa would ever get involved, because he had to take all the rugs out to shake them and “winterize” them, as grandma said - meaning rubbing them with fresh snow and ice to clean them out and give them a fresh look. This was back in the day when Romania actually did get white Decembers. Not anymore.
On Christmas Day - we all got together, kids, parents and mom’s parents, to eat for most of the day. It was an all-day affair, we would get together at grandma’s house (where we kids lived) and the parents would come from out of town (where they lived) in the morning. We’d set the table up and start the feast around 12 and eat on till the evening. My grandparents only had my parents to visit and then on the second and third day of Christmas my grandma would take us kids to see her sisters. Grandpa always stayed home.
Later on, when I was in middle school now, we moved in with my parents who also had moved back in town. The rituals were very similar: dad was in charge of buying all the food and coming up with the drinks and also the presents. Again, I don’t remember much along the lines of an adult gift-giving tradition. Kids got presents but I can’t even remember if they were wrapped.
I remember I was the first one in my family that came up with gifts for everyone for Christmas and I was in college and making my own money. I got one thing for each person and there was no such thing as gift wrap paper, so I wrapped the presents in newspaper. And there was no tape either, so you’d have to wrap them tight without it. But that was way later.
My favorite part of my parents’ Christmas preparation was the sausage making night. This was about a week before Christmas, because you’d need time to leave the sausages hung outside in the cold air to dry them out before cooking them on Christmas. I always helped mom and dad, usually very late at night, after everyone else was in bed. After the parents had finished that day’s chores, they’d make the sausages: dad would grind up the meats and add the seasoning, mom would clean out the intestines for the casings, and I would help dad form the sausages - he used a manual-crank meat grinder with the blade taken out to push the meat out into this funnel-shaped contraption that fitted the grinder and through which the intestines could be filled. My job was to twist the sausages at equal intervals, to make them all the same. It was a messy business and you smelled like pork fat and garlic for a week after that. But the best hand lotion I’ve ever used, too. Mom always wanted this to be the last chore of the day because it was so messy she had to spend several hours cleaning out the kitchen for the next day’s cooking.
In the many days after this, both my parents spent hours on end in the kitchen cooking all sorts of goodies. While grandma’s cooking stuck to a few dishes that were traditional, my parents made a lot of “modern” dishes in addition to those passed on from their parents. Dad was the chef in charge of the menu list and the drinks and mom was the sous chef with us kids mostly helping and in charge of cleaning the house. We also made the tree every Christmas Eve.
But after the running around, preparations, cleaning, stocking up was over and Christmas Eve would ring midnight, an eerie, peaceful, almost ominous peace would envelop everything - the house, the world around us, everything ... It was time to enjoy everything we worked so hard for and let the miracle of the holiday leave us in wonder.
Carolers came to the door on Christmas Eve and in the city, they would get money.
Like everyone else, my parents also celebrated all three days of Christmas which were all mirror images of each other at different homes. On Christmas Eve we would have our first “preview” meal of Christmas. Then, on Christmas Day my mom’s mom and dad’s sister would come over and we’d all be together as a family. On the second day of Christmas, we’d go to dad’s parents’ house. My dad’s sister was sometimes there again too and we’d eat the same foods only cooked by dad’s mom. On the third day we would go to one of my aunt’s homes or to a friend of my parents’ house for a repeat of the same goodies. The get-togethers were always the same: a very elaborate sit-down brunch-lunch-dinner lasting most of the day, with many courses spread out over 5-7 hours. We sat around the table and talked about the events of the year, school, new jobs, other family members, and very rarely about politics.
Back home, in-between the many feedings, my sister and I disappeared for hours into books. They were quiet and lazy days. Back then, most of the energy was spent figuring out where the next meal will come from and what it would be (the foods were always the same but we mixed them up during the three-day feasting season). Around Christmas, we had food for days, so no more need to cook; so, instead, we turned off and were couch potatoes.
We had no fireplace, no yard, so we spent the time in our condos, being together, listening to stories, taking in teachings from those older than us ... It was the time to put on the brakes of a(n) (always) crazy, busy, insecure year and actually enjoy each other.
It was Christmas in another dimension when we were much older (highschool and college for me) and we were old enough to go to the mountains by ourselves and live with our relatives there. Our mountain people have always had a family farm where everything you eat you grow, harvest and kill yourself. The oldest of their children, a boy, always went up the mountain and cut his own tree which is a totally different kind of tree than the one (still a natural one) that my family would buy in the city. The two don’t compare. They almost are not the same thing. We didn’t have lots of decorations in the mountains, like we did in the city, but I remember us putting pine cones and apples on the branches.
They also killed their own pig - an event worthy of its own book. We helped with the “cleaning of the pig”, by singing off the hairs on the pig’s skin with the flame from a candle, and cutting it off the fat back with a super sharp knife, for fresh pork rinds which they would use to flavor all the foods at Christmas and beyond.
I remember how the whole Christmas pretty much revolved around this pig killing and prepping and making foods for Christmas (mostly smoked meats) from it. We ate every single thing from the animal, even the blood, and whatever we could not consume would go into the freezer for the rest of the year. The whole family was involved. The parents, the three kids, the grandparents, and my sister and I. Everything happened outside, in the yard, except for the actual cooking, in the mountain air which was always as cold as a mountain stream on ice.
We spent most of the time during the day outside, in our winter coats, barely moving from too many layers, with the hands red and the skin chapped and bleeding from the wind burn and the coarse salts we used to prepare and cure the meat.
Inside, the stove always had a roaring fire, ready for the mom, the grandma, and the daughter to start cooking some of the many dishes, all of them pork based. The dad and the boys were busy making the fire outside, in the smoker, where most of the cured meats would go for a couple of days. One of the two sons would take turns during the night to go out back and ensure the fire was not out in the smoker.
The dishes we made were simple and not as numerous for the mountain Christmas - just some cozonac, sarmale, mamaliga (which is a type of Romanian polenta) and lots and lots of smoked meats - everything was fresh and so fatty! We would eat in the late morning for a couple of hours, on Christmas Day. Although we still had sit-down meals, they were not as lengthy as the ones in the city. In the mountains, you constantly had something to do, you could not linger about - mostly, many animals to feed, or wood to split for heating up every room and heating up the food. We did take naps sometimes, and when we were older we kids would go “in the village” to a club or someone’s house for a dance.
On the second and third day of Christmas, my friends’ parents would load us all up in their SUV and we’d go deep in the woods, bracing the cold and the unplowed dirt roads to see my friend’s father’s family. They lived completely off the grid, in the middle of nowhere. One year, we got stuck in the snow on one of these roads, and one of the sons had to walk through the deep-deep snow to the next village several miles to ask for help. It took hours for a tow truck to appear (on the second day of Christmas when everyone is off!) and pull us from the snowy ditch. As we waited, it got dark and the sky was filled with stars. There was no light around us outside the moon. We started hearing wolves howling in the distance and just about wet ourselves! We had pictures in our head of how we’re going to surely die - either from frost bite, or eaten alive by wolves on the second day of Christmas! The stories are plenty and I hope to God they will make their way into a book one day, if not for anyone, they might be helpful or amusing for my nephews. They were good and real times.
In addition to money, the mountain carolers got colaci (Romanian braided bagel-shaped pastries), apples and walnuts. To this day, there is no holiday for me if we don’t have some kind of fresh, hearty dough in the house, although I don’t bake myself. Everything was either home-made or hand-picked by all of us. The care, the attention, the ahead-of-time-ness made it so special for some much longer than just the one day.
I truly believe this rushed, modern world we live in nowadays abbreviated the holiday to a one-day affair. The Christmas I remember and that I am stubborn enough to still celebrate deserves to be lingered upon ...
If you've been paying attention, the one thing all of these traditions had in common was the food. When I came to America, everyone warned me about Thanksgiving having lots of foods. But to me, it was an embarrassment to call it “a lot of food”. Our feasts were, like a daily Thanksgiving times 3. And then multiply that by 3 days, not just one puny dinner!
Today, when we don’t travel for Christmas, even if it’s just the two of us, I cook. A lot. I cook so much in fact, that I end up throwing some away at the end because it’s impossible to consume it, even in 3 days, being that it’s just the two of us for meals. Nowadays, I make some Romanian staples: sarmale, my husband makes the cozonac because I am not a baker, sausages, some sort of a ground meat product like meatballs or meatloaf, a couple of other appetizer dishes. Without these, I cannot say it’s Christmas. I also give a nod to my new adoptive country and I do incorporate some American foods, as well - like ham, mashed potatoes, something green (like collards or green beans) ... And we stock up on drinks! At my parents’ house, the drink of choice was wine during these times. Especially the one dad made himself, first on farms he worked on, then in his own house. In the mountains, the drinks revolved around moonshine - the cold asked for something to warm you up. If they had wine, it was always hot, boiled, with some sorts of herbs and woodsy berries in it.
Nowadays, my husband and I do sit down for our Christmas meals (as opposed to eating in the living room on the couch) during all the three days (because yes, we do celebrate three days of Christmas in my house), but we mostly graze ... We don’t have set hours for set meals, but we eat when we wake up and when we feel nibbly during the day. We open presents on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We talk to family online, because everyone is far away. We seldom get together with friends, because everyone is busy with their own families.
Another thing that I relive this time of the year is the quiet around these days - just sitting around with absolutely no plans, other than letting your hard-labored-over goodies digest. It feels decadent and wasteful but so delicious, too! I know lots of people probably pity us for just “being alone” but I welcome it. Life is noisy. Worries abound. Work is busy. So much of life eats at our time, that this time of the year, staring down at days with no plans is a gift in itself.
Life, and especially our Western world, needs so much more quietness and reflection - and Christmas is a great excuse for this. We all become bears during this time of the year: gorge on food, then hibernate.
Technology did help with the writing and the publishing of this piece, but outside of this, I am so glad we inject our lives with so much more human, touchable, organically real and un-messed with things - no AI and no apps needed to be in touch with your humanity and human-ness.
These few days when we’re forced by the calendar to think differently are still so important to me, to pause, reflect, and enjoy the simple things that are never too far away: like feeling the raw meat of an animal that sacrificed for your nurturing in your hands when you knead it into a meatloaf, like cleaning a raw shrimp, and spending many hours cleaning mushrooms under the cold running water, wondering what kind of muck those little hats had to push through to come to being, like waiting with bated breath for the oven to be done with its things only to be able to judge whether what comes of it is edible or just passable ...
Around Christmas, I feel like I am consciously jumping off the mouse wheel and meaningfully taking a break. And my body feels better (albeit more sore and at times uncomfortably full, but decidedly more alive), and my mind thinks more clearly, and my thoughts are clearer and able to plan for what’s ahead - as far as we can see what is ahead.
But the here and now, the proximity of each other and the real-ness of what’s on the table, the memories that I am still lucky to hold in my head quite vividly, this is what makes up the lazy days of Christmas for me and towards which my gratitude goes.
Whether you celebrate the birth of Jesus, or the Rededication of the Sacred Temple, or renewal and rebirth, or ancestor remembrance, or just the end of a year ... I hope you take the time to reflect, turn inwards, find yourself truely, think back before you leap ahead. If you’re lucky like me, maybe you remember your childhood memories. And if you are really lucky, maybe you get to recreate them ...
Happy Holidays, everyone!
