As
long as I can remember there were always two different Christmases at our
house: the one celebrated by my friends and acquaintances and the one
celebrated by my Polish parents. Pieces of the two intermingled in my head – a
kind of attempt to make whole something that existed in parts. When friends on
the school bus would ask me after the holiday what I got for Christmas, I knew
that I was supposed to rattle off a wonderful list of things I had received to
show how much I was loved and that I was as worthy and valuable in this world
of Nebraska land as they were. But part
of me, a quiet, secret part knew this standard of my value was based on a false
premise.
My
parents were Polish war refugees who came to the United States on an American
military ship in 1949 after World War II ended. They met in a Displaced
Person’s camp in Germany, married and had two children, my younger brother and me,
before coming to Nebraska, a land that held the promise of a new life and a
better future for their children. Three more children were born and thrived in
this new country. My mother had been a teacher in Poland who had been taken
from her village and put in forced labor in Germany during the war. My father,
a young man displaced by the war and struggling to survive on village farms,
ended up in a German concentration camp during the last 6 months of the war,
finally escaping during a forced march of prisoners from one camp to another
when Allied forces were approaching. These were the stories I came from, the
ones I grew up knowing.
I
knew it wasn’t about the presents from the very beginning. I knew it because my
mother told me it was about seeing the first star on Christmas Eve so that we
could sit down to eat our Christmas Eve feast of fish and homemade, labor-
intensive pierogi stuffed with cottage cheese. And although there was no straw
on the table at our house, my parents would describe Christmases of their past
when there would be straw just like in Jesus’s manger. And then there was the
magic of Midnight Mass. Even the littlest ones were bundled up sleeping or
awake and transported to the candlelit church on a cold Nebraska night where
baby Jesus lay in his manger near the altar waiting for us to visit him. I had
never heard of Santa Claus until my school friends talked about him in an
all-knowing way that I knew better than to question. I envied their lack
of doubt and the fact that they all
seemed to be part of the same story – one that began and ended in their small
town. I wanted so much to be a part of that story, to be a real American. I was
determined to accept and become everything my friends were, and it was easy to
take part in a fantasy like Santa Claus. Much easier than fantasies of having a
living room suite bought new from the local department store; a shiny car -and
a mother who knew how to drive it instead of walking to the grocery store; or
of having short stylish hair, not the long braids that my parents refused to
let me cut until I was older.
The
highlight of our Christmas eve meal and the sacred tradition that had to be
completed before anyone could touch a morsel of food was the sharing of the
“oplatek”, a communion type wafer sent to us by our relatives in Poland-
grandmas, aunts, uncles, and cousins- that I had never set eyes upon and who
had seen me only in photographs sent by my mother in her best effort to
maintain the fragile connection of blood over an incredibly huge ocean that
divided my parents from their past. Everyone broke off a piece of each other’s
oplatek and wished each other well for the coming year. It was a time to look
in each person’s eyes and find love and peace reflected in them, one of the few
times in the year we were willing to do that.
We
opened our presents on Christmas Eve and not Christmas morning like my friends;
and there was usually only one special gift and sometimes one little extra
package for each of the five of us. There were no wish lists or letters to
Santa. My tatusz did the shopping and he loved surprises. But before we could
open any gifts we had to sing. My father insisted on that. He told us he fell
in love with our mother because of her beautiful voice, and we knew it was true
because of the way he would beg her to sing on special occasions. We did our
best to please. Our mother taught us the Polish Christmas carols of her
childhood and as I got older and learned to play the piano, I would become the
accompanist. Each child also had to sing a solo song and it became my job as the
piano playing oldest to help my younger brothers and sister pick out a song and
practice it before that much anticipated evening. As we got older the songs
were mostly all in English- our new native tongue. I loved it when my sister
sang, “All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth,” when she turned six or
seven and had actually had lost her front teeth.
One
Christmas my father had a special surprise for us. Unbeknownst to the children,
he had purchased a reel to reel tape recorder at an auction in the farming
community where we lived. He hid the recorder in a bedroom near the piano and
taped the entire evening from the singing to the opening of presents. An unbelievable
surprise when he started replaying the tape and we didn’t know where the voices
were coming from! And then, every year after that he would insist on playing it
again. After I left home, got married, and began to have children of my own, he
gave me a cassette copy of it. He had one made for each of us. I still have it,
but I don’t think I have ever played it. I am not sure why not. Perhaps I don’t
need to listen to it on a machine when it is still very much a part of my
being. I can hear the excitement of the children’s voices, the old, out of tune
piano, the giggles when someone made a mistake, my mother’s beautiful soprano,
and the anticipation and magic of that evening – a celebration of a Polish
Christmas in a small Nebraska town where Santa Claus was stopping at my friends’
houses that very same night.
Or
perhaps it was too painful to listen to the past when I had put my past behind
me and moved several hundred miles away to the east with my husband and
daughter. An ocean of states now separated me from those memories. I had
married an American – a college-football playing American in fact, perhaps more
acceptable to me and my family because of his Lithuanian roots and his Lithuanian/Polish
name. My three American children grew up believing in Santa Claus until one
Christmas night the two oldest ones heard us coming down from the attic with
their presents. They kept the fiction for their little brother until later. I
still sang Polish Christmas carols for them at the piano but did not teach them
the words so foreign to them. They were curious about the pierogi I made on
Christmas Eve and my story about the first star and straw on the table. They somehow
seemed to understand that this was a connection for them as well, something
that tied them to Babcia and Dziadek, aunt and uncles in Nebraska, and
relatives they had never met in a distant country somehow connected by a
fragile thread of love through their mother to them.
