For a morning like this…
Christmas Eve Morning
Amid the bustle of a waking house…
As if turning the lever of a strong time machine with my thoughts, I bounce thirty years back.
To my childhood home.
The same… Christmas Eve morning.
From the small apartment kitchen, I’m woken by the concert of sizzling pans and clattering pot lids.
The air is permeated with the scent of food, prepared by Mom, quickly dispelling sleep.
Still lying in warm bedding, I let my gaze wander over the garland stretched across the room.
From the lamp to the bookshelf, from the bookshelf to the curtain rod.
No one else.
It’s me, who, for weeks… had been making it.
Carefully cutting pieces of colored paper into strips, threading them into circular rings, and matching colors to create a long chain of connected rings.
Sometimes it would break, and the whole beautiful room installation would be ruined.
Then I’d glue it back together again.
But on Christmas Eve morning, it hung neatly, straightened out, swinging gently with my childish thoughts.
Pulling the curtain aside, I press my nose against the cold apartment window.
I don’t know if it’s only my heart that wants to remember so vividly, but in my childhood, Christmas mornings were always snowy.
Or perhaps memory painted them that way, thanks to the white paper snowflakes stuck on the window?
Through their various cut-out shapes, I would gaze at the winter world.
Slipping quietly from the room, Mom greets me.
She spends the entire day in the kitchen without sitting down.
She lays silvery herring on plates.
Armed with huge mittens, she pulls from the hot oven a massive tray of yeasty, puffy “Šližikai” buns.
During dinner, with eyes tightly shut, we would scoop handfuls from the huge bowl, letting the fortune decide—would we have an even number of buns, signaling paired years ahead?
Balancing on the kitchen stool, I scoop some still-warm Kūčiukai into my childish fists and count them on the table.
I’m practicing.
To make them EVEN.
The coffee grinder whirs.
But this time, it’s not coffee beans spinning inside, but poppy seeds that will soon become the filling for the ŠALTANOSIAI—baked only once a year.
Soon the day rolls into the afternoon…
And our family prepares to visit the Grandparents.
Plates of food we’ve made all day are carefully packed into newspaper sheets.
And having packed our cat (because no one may be left alone that night) into Dad’s big leather bag, we set off to join the Christmas Eve table.
The journey is long.
Or maybe just short little legs?
Our noses and cheeks sting from the cold, wrapped tightly in scarves.
At the Grandparents’ house, the smells are just as strong.
In the first room, a long table is spread, carefully covered with a “begged-for” white tablecloth, from under whose edges peeks a handful of straw.
One room in the Grandparents’ house was always kept locked.
“We ventilate it,” Grandpa would smile, so Santa Claus, visiting for Christmas, wouldn’t overheat.
Oh, how curious it was to poke even the tip of a nose into that cool, ventilated room!
Where, under the large fir branches, gifts would magically “land” after the Christmas Eve dinner.
Let me emphasize: M A G I C A L L Y.
Because no matter how many times we tried to peek through the keyhole before dinner, it always ended in a deep, childish sigh:
“Nothing…”
But after eating—some kind of miracle happened!
And with a flick of the light switch by an adult hand, unreachable to us children, gifts would appear beneath the heavily decorated green branches, adorned with old-fashioned ornaments!
With our bellies full and arms hugging the gifts we’d just received, our family would turn back toward home.
A small apartment on the other side of town.
Usually, we walked.
Through the emptied streets of Panevėžys.
And though the way wasn’t very short, little legs carried us in quickened steps…
Because in those locked houses, under the green Christmas tree… another miracle had to have happened.
In my childish mind, I never thought about where Christmas Eve miracles came from.
Perhaps that’s why they remain etched in memory as real miracles.
Look around.
Today, many shining eyes are scurrying nearby, waiting for a MIRACLE.
One wants to believe in it—even after a third of a century.
