How is Christmas Eve/Christmas in your family? (Patreon)

Do your guys' families have any particular Christmas traditions? It's always super interesting to hear how other people around the world spend their holidays.   For example for Bulgaria, the 24th is the *important* day, let's call it, and the 25th is more of a fun afterthought 😂 On the evening of the 24th you usually get together with your closest family members and there are so many different traditions that my family still kept up with even in Canada. Most people in Bulgaria are orthodox so the traditions revolve around that.   

My favourite part was always the soda bread. You basically fast on the 24th, in the sense that you don't eat animal products, everything is vegan, and the bread shouldn't be made with yeast. And in the soda bread, you hide a (washed and sanitized lol) coin inside the bread, turn it a few times so you forget where you put it, and bake it.  Then before dinner, you put a candle (one of those long, thin beeswax candles) in the centre of the bread and let it burn for about 20 mins. Then before we begin dinner we light frankincense in a little ceramic pot and go around blessing and cleansing each room of the house from any bad energy of the year, to prepare the home for the year ahead. And then we go back to the dinner table, and each person takes turns holding the ceramic pot with the burning frankincense, saying a wish they have for the new year.

After that, the soda bread part has always been my favourite since I was little. The oldest person of the home/family will start tearing the bread into pieces, and as you break it apart, you give a name to/assign the piece of bread, starting with a piece for god, a piece for the holy spirit I think (I can't remember), one piece for the home, and then each person of the family gets a piece assigned to them. And basically if you get the coin in your piece of bread, you'll be lucky and fortunate for the year ahead. If the home gets the piece, your home will be safe, protected and prosperous. If the piece with the coin inside was the one for god, the whole family will be safe and protected. If you get the coin in your piece, you'll have luck and fortune for the year ahead and so on and so fourth. And even if you're not religious, you still partake just because you grew up with it as a cozy tradition.   

And I remember always waiting until the clock hit 12:00 am until we could eat the Baklava, because technically you can't have it until the 24th is over. We eat baked beans, and rice-stuffed vine (grape) leaves, roasted and marinated red peppers, sour/fermented vegetables (my favourite) etc.. We also have the eastern european version of Kimchi, where it's basically only cabbage, and we use those leaves to make a type of "dolma", with rice inside. It's essentially the same thing as the vine leaves stuffed with rice, but there's a version with cabbage leaves, too. I remember also having baked apples, sometimes filled with walnuts and cinnamon.

At the end of dinner, you usually lift the majority of the empty plates, but you leave the table mostly as it is, with the food on it, so that anyone from your family that has passed away can also enjoy the food during the night.    I don't know, these are just some of the coziest things I remember that I just adore. Down to the tiniest details like the traditional tablecloths, bowls, and plates we have. I always wonder how Christmas is celebrated for other cultures (for the people that celebrate it, of course).

I genuinely can't remember if I've shared this before. It's just so interesting, and will probably sound foreign to some of you 😂

Looks like this:

https://trud.bg/public/images/articles/2022-12/0647-1_1745927238653883284_original.jpg  https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-

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https://www.hera.bg/im/5021.w625.jpg

https://static.bnr.bg/gallery/64/64339158463dd16206ccd99570934ad6.jpg