I'm Dreaming Of a Greek Christmas

 Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! Kalla Christouyenna! Chronia Polla!

The holiday season for me always featured persimmons (lotta) and pomegranates (rotha).

While we also have Chanukah and Kwanzaa at this time of year, my Greek Heritage tradition is to prepare for and celebrate the birth of Christ, also known as Christmas or Christouyenna as we say in Greek.

Christmas baking preparation. If you'd like to learn a Greek phrase and listen to one of my Christmas season memories of baking with my aunt, click on the following video.

Preparing for the feast. In the story that I share in this video, my aunt and I were shaping the traditional Merlomakarona cookies stuffed with walnuts and honey. The cookies are baked, cooled, dipped into a honey syrup, and topped with crushed walnuts. There is a theme here with these ingredients. Read on.

Other traditional Christmas favorites are Kourabiethes, the shortbread cookies dusted liberally with powdered sugar and consumed calmly. This is a technique mastered after years of breathing too hard, moving while eating, or sitting where a relative might swish by too rapidly and cause a light breeze. What you learn is that powdered sugar moves at the speed of whatever bit of moving air is nearby and that you'll need a plate or napkin to catch remnants of cookies and sugar that fall with every bite. It's a Greek thing. Maybe next year I'll share an instructional video of how to eat Kourabiethes. We also have Thiples (folded fried sweet dough dipped in a honey syrup and topped dusted with cinnamon, ground nuts, or both) and Karithopita, the walnut spice cake that I love and prefer to the better known Baklava.

Wrapped bundles of crisp Thiples ready for gifting

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire--this is not only a line from a popular Christmas song. It is also the method used to roast chestnuts over small grills all over Europe. In Greece, the grills were small and the smell of roasting chestnuts permeated the air in Sparta, where I lived as a very young girl. It was quite a treat to have a bag full of chestnuts to enjoy when we got home from an evening stroll.

A serrated knife and a strong, steady hand are required for scoring chestnuts

Ready for the oven or the fire in your fireplace or a wood-fired grill

Fasting and Feasting. The presence of the Greek Orthodox Church is as normal as breathing (and as important) in the Greek culture. Many of us who emigrated from Greece, have merged the rituals and traditions of our mother country with those of our adopted country, which is why I don't follow all of the fasting periods religiously. Yes, I meant to say that.  Fasting during the holiday season is prescribed by the church, but so is feasting. It's a beautiful balance, and the fasting allows for introspection, prayer, meditation, and giving thanks for the abundance in our lives. This is also the time for preparing all of the foods that we will share with friends and family when we begin the feasting.

I wish you all a beautiful holiday season full of the foods that you remember from the traditions that you grew up with and around. It is still a season of joy. We do all that we can to help others less fortunate than us. It is our responsibility to help care for others, but it is also our responsibility to be grateful for what we have and to enjoy the bounty of our labor and circumstances. Kalla Christouyenna! Chronia Polla!

καλά Χριστούγεννα

Χρόνια πολλά