What were your holiday traditions as a child?..

[Princess Turandot]

I recall that on Holy Thursday we made the rounds to various neighborhood churches to see the Adoration of the Host amid the purple drapped crosses & statues. Living in NYC, in an neighborhood with many ethnic immigrants, there were quite a few churches in walking distance. I think we usually got to at least 5.

Good Friday was church & a seafood meal.

My mother was of Polish descent, so on Holy Saturday we would take a basket of food stuffs to be eaten at Easter breakfast to our church to be blessed. That would usually include dyed hard boiled eggs, bread of some sort, kielbasa (not my favorite, by far) butter & salt and pepper. We would eat that food among other things on Easter morning. (I avoided the kielbasa.) We always had ham for Easter dinner.

At Christmas, Poles traditonally serve a seafood meal on Christmas Eve. They refer to the night as Wigilia. (Vee-geel-ya.) One interesting custom was the sharing of oplatek (o-pwa-tek) which was a wafer made from the same ingredients as the host, but not consecrated, of course. The Sisters at our school would bake the wafers in molds with scenes like the nativity. You would break pieces of oplatek with family members on Christmas Eve. People, especially out-of-towners, would include some oplatek in their Xmas cards to symbolically break the wafer with each other.

We always had turkey for dinner. And of course, at some point during the holidays, we would visit other neighborhood churches to see their nativity scenes.

On the feast of the Three Kings, the Pastor of our church would visit parish members' homes and bless the home. He would also write the names of the three kings above the door to the home (on the inside) with blessed chalk. Given the habits of the pastor, he might have taken a swift celebratory drink with the man of the house. Good thing that they always had altar boys in tow, and this was done on foot.

We never went to Midnight Mass or Mass of the Resurrection. I think that was largely because the kids from the school were expected to attend the 9AM mass with their classmates.

Gentler days, all in all!