It’s the week before Christmas, and my family has started preparations for the upcoming holiday. We have Croatian heritage, which means the Christmas holiday is celebrated on the 24th of December. Old recipes are brought out of storage and grocery trips are well underway at least a week before the holiday.
Our family’s foods look a little different than the traditional American Christmas ham and are reflective of generations of handwritten recipes that have to be taught to each new generation. For starters, my family has to take a trip to a local sausage shop to pick up hot kobasica (a hot sausage) and a sour head cabbage meant for a meat wrapped dish called sarma. The sourhead cabbage is kept in a large plastic barrel and is wrapped in plastic for each Croatian family in the area.
After a trip to the store, we prepare meat-wrapped cabbage called Sarma, hot kobasica, and Croatian desserts such as povatica and kifles. Together, at my grandparents house, we start with the povatica, which takes the longest to prepare. No one is left out of the Christmas food preparations, and even my grandfather steps in to help out with each dish.
The Povatica, or nut roll, is made with thin pastry dough and a sweet nut filling and is rolled into a log for baking. The dough has to be kneaded by hand and sit overnight in the refrigerator before it is rolled out thin on our dining room table and stuffed with a sweet honey filling. It will be a dessert, a breakfast ,and a snack well into the new year.
The kobasica takes the least amount of time to prepare as it’s simply cut into smaller pieces and added to the sarma to be cooked in boiling water. But the sarma is probably the most labor-intensive part of the Christmas dinner preparation. Multiple ground meats, usually beef and pork, are combined in a metal bowl with rice, spices and a raw egg to hold everything together. The meat is then rolled small meatballs, sometimes weighed to the correct size by my grandmother, so that it doesn’t fall apart during cooking.
The sourhead cabbage, bought special for the dish, is torn apart leaf by leaf. The meatball is added in the center and rolled tightly to create the savory traditional dish. Year after year, I’m usually told the meatballs I’ve measured are too large to stay wrapped tightly in the cabbage. I don’t yet have the same touch as my older relatives who have years of experience on me.
The assembled sarma is placed in a pot on the stove to cook with the hot kobasica and fills the house with a familiar aroma that brings back memories of Christmas’ past. Finally, the Christmas cookies are ready to be prepped.
One of my favorites to make is the kifles. The kifles, or kiflice, are crescent-shaped cookies filled with finely ground walnut honey paste and topped with powdered sugar. The povatica dough has to be rolled out thinly in the same manner, but not too thin that the dough rips. It’s then cut into small squares, filled with a small drop of nut filling, and rolled from corner to corner and folded into the iconic crescent shape.
The cookies are baked in rounds and my family alternates between making the traditional Croatian cookies to more American style cookies such as peanut butter blossoms. All of the cooking and baking usually takes over two days to make from start to finish and all hands are on deck to prepare all the foods.
My family follows handwritten recipes passed down for at least five generations, but most of the recipes are memorized by my 70-year-old grandparents and soon will be on my generation to upkeep.
After days of preparation and baking, Christmas Eve finally arrives, where my entire family eats the foods we’ve made at my grandparents house before heading off to the Croatian Catholic church for midnight mass called Polnoćka. We sit together at my family’s dining room table, all nine of us squished together with tons of food and some glasses of wine.
After mass, we return to my grandparents to eat more cookies, often have another serving of sarma and open presents. We share some gossip of who we saw at Christmas Eve mass and who showed up after one too many drinks. We aren’t strict Catholics, but we all make sure to eat well before midnight to make it to the Christmas mass celebration.
At the end of the night we sit on the couch, have some cookies, and watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, a family favorite.
Christmas Day is often less planned, and we all hang out to eat leftovers and watch the Christmas Day football games. My grandparents always make sure to make enough food to have leftovers for all my family past Three King’s Day in January. The sourhead cabbage sarma is typically kept in our garages because the smell is so strong it will take over the entire house.
For my family, the holiday starts on Christmas Eve and lasts until January 6th, or Three Kings Day – the day that is said to be when the Three Kings visited Jesus in the nativity. It’s also the day of Serbian Christmas, and although my family’s roots are Croatian, we still acknowledge the later Serbian Christmas celebration. Our food is sure to last at least until that week of January, but leftovers often don’t last much longer than that.