Christmas Eve in Ukraine

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate Christmas according to Julian calendar! Phew! That's pretty long greeting! In Ukraine, we great each other saying "Jesus is being born!" and the answer is "Glory to Him!" We also do a lot of other things that are quite different from Christmas on the 25th of January. I've already written one post about that and you can check it out here
www.ukraineandukrainians.com/2019/01/how-ukrainians-celebrate-christmas.html


I decided to write about our celebration one more time mainly because this year I am back home and my family was showing our traditional celebration to my husband. So according to a very old tradition, we are supposed to have 12 dishes on the table referring this way to 12 apostles that were disciples of Jesus Christ. We didn't prepare all 12 this year since it's a lot of dishes for 4 people and a ton of cooking for 2 women though in such case we involve our men. So we did cook the core meals that are considered as a must for any Christmas table. The main dish that I can't imagine my Christmas without is Kutia. It has sacral meaning to us: the unity of all ingredients means fertility, health and wealth. By eating it, we kind of program our year to be abundant and successful. The eldest family member is supposed to say a prayer before each participant takes a spoonful of Kutia at the very beginning of the dinner. In my family, this role belonged to my grandfather, but in 2020 he passed away and it was weird to have the first bite of Kutia without his opening word. But life goes on... and Kutia was on our table just like always.

The base for Kutia is cooked barley mixed with poppy seeds, raisins, walnut and dressed with honey. Depending on the region it can be very thick or even resemble a cold soup. The "tough" part in preparing Kutia is poppy seeds. At first, they soak in hot water and after that the most demanding and old school part of preparation takes place.

So as you can tell I was grinding poppy seeds with a bit of sugar in a special looking bowl which we call "makitra". The more Kutia you plan to make - the more poppy seed you will have to grind. On top of that ground poppy seed is used for another traditional Christmas dish - buckwheat pancakes stuffed with poppy seed. The dough for those pancakes is a bit different from everyday one because it's made with yeast and mix of wheat and buckwheat flour. That's where my husband had to step in and grind buckwheat grits in old manual coffee mill for us to finish cooking. Then you have to "wrap" dough around the stuffing skillfully and fry them:

Another absolute must on the table is my favorite varenyky or as they are traditionally called in the US "pierogi" (polish word for varenyky). Since the Christmas Eve dinner takes part during the lent which is over only at midnight all the dishes on the table are meat-free. So varenyky are traditionally cooked with sauerkraut previously fried with a little bit of diced onions or potatoes with onion or mushrooms.

We also cook some kind of fish. It can be either fried or baked but this year we substituted it with marinated herring that goes really well with baked potatoes. So as I've mentioned before, we didn't have all 12 dishes but our table looked very festive

So one more time - Merry Christmas! Христос ся Рождає! - Славімо Його!