Here is a piece on Polish jelly donuts called paczkis that our new senior producer Dave McGuire reported for The World’s GeoQuiz. In my best Homer Simpson, “Mmmmm… jeelllllyyyyy dooonnnutttsss.”
My old pal Dave McGuire produced a short piece on paczkis, the traditional jam filled donuts gobbled up on Fat Thursday in Poland. Here it is featured on PRI’s The World.
~reblogged by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
A Polish Grandmother’s Christmas Story
by Paul Clement Czaja, guest contributor
A Christmas scene from Syria. (Charles Roffey/Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0)
As a Polish family, the real celebration of Christ’s birth for us took place on Christmas Eve with the singing of carols before sharing together a festive dinner. And then, finally, when the night outside was deep and decorated with a billion stars, all the family would sit around the Christmas tree, and our dad would give out the presents to each and every one of us. But my story takes place on that Christmas Eve afternoon so many years ago when I was still a kid growing up in the Bronx.
After my mother had prepared the big dining room table with a large, lovely white linen tablecloth, Grandma would come down from her apartment upstairs and place a white plate piled high with brown dates in the middle of the still empty table. My brother Peter and I would get up and begin eating some of these unusually sweet and sticky exotic fruits. We did so every Christmas, but on this particular time I was puzzled enough to ask Grandma how come we only got dates on that one day of the year. We never had dates on any other day — only on Christmas Eve. Why? She smiled at Peter and me and invited us to come and sit down and told us this story:
