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So last week I contracted a peculiar illness that merely made me sleep for over twelve hours one day and nearly so long on several more days and feel sort of ragged with no real symptoms, and I wasn't quite sure it was a physical malady until it was nearly gone. This week I've been doing the Chanukah thing and the Christmas thing. I didn't wrap presents until tonight and then I had to wrap lots and lots of them.
Today I did something I've never done before: I made a Christmas Eve supper for a bunch of friends. I was sort of celebrating the three ways I am not a Pole -- I made a bunch of things loosely based on Polish recipes, kind of. Thanks to the magic of yellow beets I made borscht that doesn't look like borscht, and I made uszki, which is sort of like tortellini but a different shape, really tiny dumplings filled with forest mushrooms. And I made pierogis, which actually my mother called piroshki. And some salads. And there you are. No oblaten wafer because we aren't Christians. And no hay under the tablecloth because I can't keep the house clean as it is.
The four ways I am not a Pole are:
1. My great-great grandmother was a German from Gdansk whenn it was called Danzig and was in Germany and not Poland.
2. Another relative on that side was from the Amber Coast, from a town which was sometimes in Poland.
3. My name is Sorbian -- which is a Slavic language from the part of Germany which was in Greater Poland at one time.
4. My mother's entire family comes from the Jewish ghetto in Vilnius, but they always called it Wilnow (they pronounced it Vilna)and said that it had been in Poland as far as they were concerned, and not Lithuania. The definitions of Lithuania v. Poland have not always been quite clear.
This covers most of my heritage -- my father's mother's family was sort of Englishish, but I bet if I was patient I could find out some interesting ways in which they were not Polish too.
I have been getting no writing done. I never can in holiday conditions when they're all around all the time and people expect me to socialize.
I'm this close to declaring that I have a social phobia, and letting people be all surprised when I show my face anywhere. The real truth, of course, is that I am merely lazy.
Today I did something I've never done before: I made a Christmas Eve supper for a bunch of friends. I was sort of celebrating the three ways I am not a Pole -- I made a bunch of things loosely based on Polish recipes, kind of. Thanks to the magic of yellow beets I made borscht that doesn't look like borscht, and I made uszki, which is sort of like tortellini but a different shape, really tiny dumplings filled with forest mushrooms. And I made pierogis, which actually my mother called piroshki. And some salads. And there you are. No oblaten wafer because we aren't Christians. And no hay under the tablecloth because I can't keep the house clean as it is.
The four ways I am not a Pole are:
1. My great-great grandmother was a German from Gdansk whenn it was called Danzig and was in Germany and not Poland.
2. Another relative on that side was from the Amber Coast, from a town which was sometimes in Poland.
3. My name is Sorbian -- which is a Slavic language from the part of Germany which was in Greater Poland at one time.
4. My mother's entire family comes from the Jewish ghetto in Vilnius, but they always called it Wilnow (they pronounced it Vilna)and said that it had been in Poland as far as they were concerned, and not Lithuania. The definitions of Lithuania v. Poland have not always been quite clear.
This covers most of my heritage -- my father's mother's family was sort of Englishish, but I bet if I was patient I could find out some interesting ways in which they were not Polish too.
I have been getting no writing done. I never can in holiday conditions when they're all around all the time and people expect me to socialize.
I'm this close to declaring that I have a social phobia, and letting people be all surprised when I show my face anywhere. The real truth, of course, is that I am merely lazy.
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