Kales Yiortes. That’s Happy Holidays in Greek. And, no, I’m
not using the generic greeting in deference to Chanukah and Kwanza (although we wish everyone a warm and wonderful Holiday Season). Rather, there are so many individual celebrations that fall inside the Greek 12 Days of Christmas that I’d be here all day writing them out, so Happy Holidays should about cover it.

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Ever since I (Lori) was introduced to Greek mythology, I wanted to be, well, Greek. Since that wasn’t possible, I did the next best thing and married one (becoming Greek by, um, injection, as one Tampa radio host put it). My first Greek Christmas experience came when I was twenty-two and actually in Greece. Talk about diving head first into the deep end of the baptism pool. I was raised Catholic in a place where menorahs are as common as Christmas trees, and icon kissing is frowned upon at best, sacrilegious at worst. But in Greece where the population is 99% Greek Orthodox…well, to say that the Holidays are celebrated to the nth degree would be understating things a bit. Then again, over the past twenty some odd years I’ve been married to Tony aka Adonis (yes, that’s really his name and he’ll always be my own, personal Greek god), I’ve come to understand that for the Greeks, to breathe is to live, and to live is to break plates.

On the third Day of Christmas my true love gave to me, three live hens, two wild boars and lamb’s innards on a silver tray…

The true festivities begin when you return from midnight mass to break the two-week Christmas fast, the house filling up with family (Tony’s parents’ place in this instance [we lived two floors up from them that year]), the table laden with food and huge bottles of wine ready to be poured. The first thing I learned was to try not to name the food being piled onto my plate (well, okay, it actually took me some time to learn this; call me squeamish, but lamb intestines is so not on my list of favorites), because to have goat meat served up beside whole roasted baby pig is not only common but the standard. And if you’re dining with the Greeks, you HAVE to eat. They stop just short of force-feeding it to you, but their methods are just as effective as saying “open wide.” This is the point where you really appreciate their custom of knocking back wine like shots of liquor and are ready to elevate tsatsiki (a very strong garlic-cucumber yogurt sauce) to a key spot on the food pyramid.

Ah, and then there was the dancing. When was the last time you went to your in-laws for the Holidays, ate dinner, then moved all the furniture out of the way so everyone could dance until their feet hurt, or until the wine ran out, or both? From Christmas Day on, imagine a nonstop line of joined hands and happy feet moving over a carpet of broken plates while traditional bouzouki music flows from the houses to fill the streets. Opa!

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And the traditions I learned that first Greek Holiday Season… There are so many of them, it’s so difficult to pick my favorites, but I’ll give it a shot. First, Christmas dinner is begun with Christopsomo, round Christmas sweet bread that’s crossed three times before cutting by the head of the house, a piece given to each diner. Another similar custom is the cutting of Vassilopita, a round New Year’s cake that has a coin hidden inside. Whoever receives the piece bearing the coin is said to have extra luck for the year. (This is done in each house and later at businesses, with “the cutting of the Vassilopita" a bit of a post-holiday party in the case of the latter, often times including the families of the employees so the season can stretch to February or until lent. Gotta love the Greeks!)

In all seriousness, until I experienced the Holidays in Greece, the 12 Days of Christmas existed as only a song for me. As a writer, I’ve got to appreciate the symmetry of the celebration. You have your beginning by way of Christmas, your middle via New Year’s, and your end with Epiphany. As a human being, this time of family togetherness and high spirits left me in awe and ready to face the New Year with a bag full of happy memories and, well, all partied out.

So if Tony and I could wish you three things they would be good health, the warmth of family (whichever way you define it), and a very strong stomach.

Kala Christouyenna kai Kali Xronia! (Merry Christmas and Happy New Year)

You can read an expanded version of the above, with pics by clicking here.