There's No Feast Like One That Follows a Fast
I don’t know many fans of Christmas food. Most people say that if it was any good we'd want to cook it more than once a year. It's a fair point, I must admit. Besides the beetroot soup and cabbage pierogi which I love and will happily have at any time, some of the other stuff is pretty hard to defend.
All around the world, traditional cuisine is poor people’s cuisine that might or might not have evolved to match modern tastes. Here in Poland a large chunk of that evolution happened under communism, which didn’t allow for much variety or sophistication. On top of that, the traditional Polish Christmas feast doesn’t include any meat - just fish, cake, and some dishes made of flour and the rare seasonal veggies.
Poland celebrates Christmas primarily on Christmas Eve, which used to be the culmination of Advent fast. Even the Catholic Church doesn't officially require fasting on this day now, but this tradition is so strong that everyone I know still sticks to fish-based and vegetarian dishes. They might have replaced the dreaded communist carp with salmon or shrimp, made vegan variations of traditional meals, or added some oriental touches, but even the most committed atheists here can’t imagine the Christmas Eve with turkey or steak.
In the past Advent was quite a serious thing. For 40 days (later reduced to 4 weeks) everyone abstained from meat, animal fats, alcohol, tobacco, joyful music, and dancing. This isn’t required anymore, but the Church still recommends refraining from something nice and luxurious during Advent. I stopped going to church more than a decade ago, but I still use this time to take a break from things I’m most addicted to. At the moment it’s Twitter, but in the past I did this with alcohol, candy, or other substances. I haven’t really restricted my diet in any serious way though.
Did our ancestors fast for religious or practical reasons? It must have been a mix of both, or rather, religious and practical reasons supported each other. When food was scarce and had to last for an entire winter, it made perfect sense to restrict your consumption at least some of the time. And it’s way easier to abstain from finer things when everyone else does it too, and there’s a Holy Day in the end that gives it meaning and importance. Instead of feeling that you’re deprived of something, you’re doing it all for a purpose.
When my mom was a kid, her family didn’t eat anything at all on Christmas Eve until the first star appeared in the evening sky. This was a sign to officially begin the holiday feast, with up to 12 different dishes. Even if these dishes were as simple as a cabbage and mushroom stew or poppy seed noodles, how amazing they must have tasted after a whole day of not eating at all, and a few more weeks of eating very plain things? Can anything taste this special to someone like me who can order the finest food from any cuisine in the world at pretty much any time she wants?
I wouldn’t probably be asking myself these questions if I didn’t get very nauseous and sick the night before Christmas Eve. I ended up not eating anything before the official feast - neither for religious nor practical reasons, but simply because the mere thought of food was giving me chills. I’m feeling much better now, but still for the whole three days of Christmas I ate much less than I do normally, and definitely much, much less than I did for the whole previous week.
I sometimes hear people say they ate so much on Christmas that they could hardly move. This was rarely my experience, but eating very little at this time is still pretty new to me. And frankly I don’t feel like I have been deprived of something. For the last few months I’ve had so much delicious restaurant, takeout, and home-cooked food, that perhaps I needed this break to fully appreciate what a miracle it is. My grandparents fasted in Advent and Lent because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have survived until harvest time. Now I can have fresh vegetables, tropical fruit from all corners of the world, and as much meat as I can possibly eat, all in the middle of winter - and often available with a single click! Perhaps before the next Christmas or Easter I’ll need to consciously resign from some of these things for a few weeks. It will definitely make me appreciate the Holy Day feast so much more.