H o l i d a y M e m o r i e s…

Our Lithuanian traditions bind us during the holiday season. The required twelve foods on the Christmas Eve or Kuciu table consist of fish, bread, vegetable and fruit dishes. The Christmas Tree sparkles with geometric shapes made from straw hanging amid the lights. The "Berneliu Misios" (midnight mass) brings our communities together for the blessed event of Jesus’ birth. Christmas Day finds us visiting each other merrily singing songs, sharing stories, and eating wonderful foods only served for this special day.

Yet, with all the similar traditions we carry from Christmas to Christmas, poignant events, such as these below, stand out to help us define the true meaning of a Lithuanian Christmas.

This was to be the first Christmas my husband and I would be spending with our newly adopted daughters from Lithuania. Kuciu dinner was wonderful. As always, my mother-in-law had prepared a delicious table filled with all the thirteen different meatless foods accompanied by my father-in-law’s own homemade red wine. The girls enjoyed the meal – my youngest daughter relished the herring dishes. What a little Lithuanian!

The girls were timid about asking to open presents. The custom in our family is to exchange gifts with family on Kucios and open presents from Kaledu Senis (Santa Claus) on Christmas morning. The girls had a blast with all their presents. They were just awe-struck at the amount of gifts and how everyone knew what they wanted.

At one point during the evening, my older daughter came up to me and asked, "Is Santa Claus coming tomorrow morning?" I told her, "Yes!" with a big smile on my face and my voice filled with enthusiasm. She just stood there with a dour look on her face.

I asked her what was wrong, and she replied, "You tell that Santa Claus to just take all those presents that are meant for us and give them to our neighbors. We don’t need any more, we already have too much." "Well, sweetheart," I replied, "it’s too late. Santa Claus is already working and I can’t get a hold of him." She kept insisting, even so far as to try to convince me that Santa has a phone in his sleigh like I have in my car.

I was so touched by her unselfishness and her genuine, almost guilty, feelings of having received so much that I had tears in my eyes. This brought back a flood of memories of my Christmases past, and how on occasion I had complained about gifts I didn’t like, or didn’t get, and felt ashamed in light of this little girl’s one simple sentence, "We already have too much…"

God has his little messengers reminding us to be selfless and giving on such glorious and holy days. One little messenger is and, I believe, always will be our little (oldest) daughter Skaidra.

— Reda Ardys-Pliura

Christmas in the coal mining regions of Pennsylvania meant many things but most important were Kucios and Midnight Mass. For days before, baking and cooking smells permeated the kitchen. The table was set with the required twelve dishes and the extended family from near and far was gathered. The head of the house, my grandfather, and later my uncle, who was a monsignor, broke the traditional wafer, and it was passed all around the table with each person breaking off a piece of the original wafer.

After Midnight Mass, we all gathered again around the table for coffee and dessert. But it wasn’t food; it was the people who made the memories of Kucios. When we sit at the table this Christmas, it will be my parents, grandparents and all the other family members who are no longer with us that will possess my memories. Even though they gave me my beautiful memories of a long ago culture from a far away land, a small part of me was taken away when each one left me. But somehow, somewhere, I feel they will also be sharing Kucios with me on Christmas Eve.

— Jeanne Dorr