Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we offer our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems).
I was in my thirties before I learned about the Christmas tradition of hiding the pickle. (No, really.) You hang a pickle ornament on your tree and the child who finds it first on Christmas Day wins … something.
The practice may have originated in Germany, but Poles (who love their Christmas traditions) often did it as well.
We never got to find the pickle when I was growing up in a Polish family on the East Coast. Instead, my mom would change our Christmas tree decorations often: one year, silver balls and tinsel with huge pink ribbons; another year, red bows with white orbs and white beaded chains. And so on. I don’t recall ever being excited about trimming the tree as a kid; there was no emotional connection to any of the objects being placed there. It was just … pretty stuff.
Looking back, I kinda wish we hid a pickle. Or a pierogi.
These days, usually on Thanksgiving weekend, my daughter and I bring up the red and green boxes from the basement filled with decorations and the 33-year-old fake tree from its perch in the garage. After the lights (“Hey, Lex, white or multi-colored this year?”) are swirled among the branches, and the gold ribbon twisted around, we pop open the boxes. Lexi gets her own, filled with Barbie ornaments that I’ve been collecting for her since she was born in 1997.
I get the rest: a mishmash of her old crafts projects like glass bulbs with now-sparse glitter; popsicle-stick mangers; construction paper trees; and store-bought photo holders with her sweet little face slipped into the center. The macrame stars I created in the ’80s. Some Victorian cloth dolls my sister sewed and mailed to me one particularly lonely holiday. And an assortment that I’ve picked up on my travels: an Eiffel Tower, San Francisco trolley cars, delicate origami, Danish paper dolls, a Venetian gondola, a Greek evil eye, a lobster on a string you pull to move its claws up and down. The pudgy-yet-chic beach babe posed in a dive, mid-air. The firefighter Santa ornament that reminds me of my dad. The porcelain Mrs. Santa as a seamstress, in honor of my mom.
And a few decrepit, handmade ornaments of Polish pierogi, borne out of a long-standing tradition that my sisters and I now carry on with our own families.
Every year, around the first weekend of December, we welcome friends into our home for a day-long pierogi-making extravaganza. There are stations: making balls out of the filling (typically potato and cheese or cabbage and mushroom); mixing and rolling the dough; pinching the filled dumplings (the hardest part); then boiling, buttering and bagging. It’s something I would do with my mom every year, when she would come to visit for the holidays from Massachusetts after dad died in 1990. Our record: 48 dozen pierogis, made over one long 16-hour stretch around 2001, by just the two of us.
Insanity.
On that hectic day with mom, I had a small bit of leftover dough. Instead of making pasta strips to dry and freeze, I rolled it out, cut it into a few circles, filled them with bits of plastic wrap, pinched them into small pierogis, put a hook on one end and let them dry out. The next day, I dipped them into shellac. Voila! Pierogi ornaments: completely pathetic, sad little preserved dumplings that have now lasted more than 20 years. Full of meaning and Just. Perfect.
A pickle? Pshaw.
