Reflections on a Polish Christmas Eve

HAMTRAMCK, Mich. – The great Polish artist, poet and playwright Stanislaw Wyspiański captured the significance of Christmas Eve – the Wigilia – for everyone who is Polish when he wrote more than a century ago, “For us this night is sacred.” 

The Wigilia dinner marked by the sharing of the Opłatek is the heart of this celebration.  It opens a window for us on eternity. At Wigilia, we escape time and space and stand united with those who have gone before us, with friends and families scattered around the globe, and with those generations yet unborn who will themselves one day call us back as they share the Opłatek. The family table is that special place where we rehearse year after year on Christmas Eve, the meaning of our ancestral faith, our national history and our family story and teach it to the next generation.

Heartfelt letters and tender cards, each with a bit of Opłatek, are sent out from Polish homes by the millions in the days before the Wigilia. The extra place setting at the Wigilia table was in the difficult times of our history the symbol of the hope of reunion with the loved ones taken away from us by the search for bread or the cruel fate of history.

One of the most cherished Polish customs associated with the Wigilia is the practice of setting at the table in the very heart of the family circle, a place for a wanderer or wayfarer, and putting a light in the window to signal our welcome. The tradition calls us to remember the obligation of hospitality that is so powerful and compelling a part of our heritage: “Gość w Dom, Bóg w Dom”- “A guest in the house is God in the house.”  But it speaks of far more than that to a nation of exiles and emigrants. The deep longing for the coming of the Messiah, which our Wigilia echoes each Christmas Eve merges with our own, longing for those who cannot be with us.

The one we await may be the spirit of a dead relative, or a long absent uncle or sister, or an unknown homeless and hungry traveler or lonely neighbor or maybe -just maybe- the Christ Child, born anew to us as on the Hallowed Eve.

The Wigilia dinner and the Opłatek remind us of the ties of love and memory, of the obligation and the faith that bind us. Pope John Paul II touched the heart of the mystery of the Polish Christmas when he said it “has shaped the soul of our people in their history, culture and traditions . . . [it] bears witness to our identity as Poles and testifies to how our nation is reborn on this night, generation after generation.”

For more information, contact Virginia Skrzyniarz
at 313.733.4535 or by email
at skrzyniarz@piastinstitute.org