Merry Polish Christmas

[Bernard Gui]

From my son Bishop Abogadissimo Gui’s Christmas message in his ward yesterday...I want to share his sentiments and wish you all Merry Christmas (Polish style)! Wesołych Świąt Bożego Narodzenia

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As many of you know, my family heritage is Polish, and I served a two-year mission in Poland.  One of my favorite Christmas traditions is the Polish Christmas Eve dinner, called Wigilia.  In Poland, Christmas Eve day is spent fasting, until the first star of the night can be seen.  Not surprisingly, children look with great anticipation for the appearance of the First Star.  Only then do Polish families sit down together to enjoy their Christmas Eve dinner.  In most homes, this consists of a feast of exactly 12 traditional dishes.  As much as I love these foods, my favorite part of Wigilia is that, no matter how many guests attend  there is always an extra chair and place-setting prepared.  Poles will tell you they do this just in case an unexpected visitor arrives.  In fact, setting a place for the unexpected guest - or niespodziewany gość - goes back centuries.  The unexpected guest might be a long lost family member, a homeless person, a neighbor in need.  If someone turns up and knocks at the door, the unexpected guest will be given a place at the table, fed magnificently, and given shelter.  Setting an empty place for the unexpected guest reminds us that no one should be alone on Christmas.

Poles are in my experience a hospitable people with a tender spot for visitors.  They have a saying, “A guest in the home is God in the home.”  It is true.  When I lived in Poland, serving as a missionary for the Church, I would often knock the doors of the large concrete apartment complexes built during the Communist era.  Now with my foreign accent and foreign religion, it wasn't always easy to be admitted past the threshold into one of these modest homes.  But when I was, these kind hosts treated me with the greatest hospitality imaginable.  I can't tell you the number of times they would pause our discussion and run down to the corner store to buy cookies and herbal tea.  I knew by the modest circumstances that these treats were a luxury they would not usually afford for themselves.  Having "a guest in the home" was truly no different for them than having "God in the home."

 

Edited December 24, 2018 by Bernard Gui