Day 110
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Tonight, as in years past, my family celebrated Christmas Eve with a modified version of the Feast of the Seven Fishes. If you don't like clicking links or reading articles or being smart, I'll give you the short of it--it's an Italian tradition that commemorates the wait for midnight, marking the birth of the Christ child.
The seven types of fish normally used are anchovies, sardines, dried salt cod, eels, squid, octopus, shrimp, mussels, oysters, and clams. We normally eat the follow--shrimp, anchovies (with white pasta...best dish ever), cod, a fish-stew with clam. We had oysters last year, and I almost did a return-to-sender with it...blah. We didn't repeat that one this year. We did have tilapia tonight instead of cod, and it tasted fantastic.
We have also done the traditional oplatki exchange in prior years, but since the number of Poles was greatly reduced this year (my brother directing the choir at church, my grandmother recouperating at home...leaving my mom and me, the half-breed) we didn't. Also surprisingly absent (I just noticed this) was the amount of Polish food absent from the dinner--did my dad pull a coup d'etat?
posted, with grace and poise, by Jason @ 12/24/2006 08:30:00 PM,
1 Comments:
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At 4:39 PM,
RVWarren said...
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Bethany's extended family on her father's side is largely Italian Catholic. The funny thing is that almost none of them like seafood of any sort. Her father doesn't like garlic, either. I'm still trying to figure out if they qualify for being Italian or not. What are your thoughts?
