In Slovakia as in Italy the lights in the streets and the decorations, make you understand that Christmas is coming..
Could you be interested to discover how we celebrate Christmas in Italy?
Christmas is the biggest holiday of the year accompanied by different costumes, folklore and celebrations, varying from country to country, both socially and religiously. There are many traditions, practices and familiar symbols of Christmas as Christmas tree, Nativity scene, Advent calendar, zampone, cotechino, the Yule log, holly, mistletoe, the Christmas star, the exchange of gifts.. Children from Trento, Udine, Verona, Piacenza, Lodi, Cremona, Mantua, Bergamo, Brescia and Modena receive gifts during the night 13th of December from Saint Lucy from Syracuse, as well as Santa Claus. The religious celebrations begin with Advent, four weeks before Christmas. During the Christmas Eve and in the same day is celebrated Midnight Mass and that of the Nativity.During this time we organize the advent songs, religious hymns and songs. A new tradition is the one to go to the markets and to the stands that animate the streets of the cities for the entire month of December, in which you can find handcrafts, ornaments and decorations for the Christmas tree, gastronomic stands which serve chestnuts, walnuts, apples, typical gingerbread, cakes and mulled wine.
During Christmas the family has to stay together. As a popular Italian proverb dictates, “Natale con i tuoi e Pasqua con chi vuoi,” that means “Spend Christmas with your family and Easter with whomever you like.” Surrounded by relatives, we celebrate Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day lunch, those are marked by big meals with traditional dishes. Christmas is celebrated the 25th of December, families in this day meet all together with the relatives to pray, to cook, to eat, to play games and to exchange presents.
As you already may know, for us the food is very important, so also during these days it cannot miss on our table, always in a big ammont. But from the North to the South we have a lot of different kind of meal and traditions.
During the Christmas Eve dinner, the 24th of December, almost everybody uses to eat fish. While the following day, during the lunch the meals are totally different depending on the region and city where you live.
In Brescia, a city in the North of Italy, where I live, we start the lunch with different kind of starters like tartines, tartles, quiches, cheese pinwheels, bruschettas…
Then we eat as first course, Casoncelli– kind of stuffed pasta, typical of the culinary tradition of Lombardy, the shell typically consists of two sheets of pasta, pressed together at the edges, like that of ravioli. They are stuffed with a mixture of bread crumbs, parmesan, garlic, parsley, nutmeg and broth. Or Lasagna – made by interleaving layers of pasta with layers of sauce, made with ragù, bechamel, Parmigiano-Reggiano. Or also Cannelloni- a cylindrical type of pasta generally served baked with a filling and covered by a sauce.
Moreover, as second course we eat Cotechino (similar to a sausage), lentiles and polenta, capon or chicken with classic, and poor, filling bresciano made with breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese.
But the most typical meal from my city is Spiedo bresciano or Brescian rotisserie, which is made by birds, pork ribs, pork shoulder, and/or pork loin that has been cooked on a spit that has been turned over low heat for many hours. The preparation is known as spiedatura and it consists in alternating the various meats in a uniform manner on the skewer.
At the end of the lunch as dessert we can have on our tables: Bossolà bresciano, Pandoro, Panettone or Sbrisolona cake. And of course fruits as oranges, mandarins and dried fruits.
In the afternoon we usually start to play some games, like Monopoli, Risiko, playing cards and Bingo, that is still one of the most popular games practiced around Christmas today.After the games some families used to watch Christmas movies on the TV.
So this is how we spend our time in Brescia during Christmas. And you, what do you do?
