Cultural: December 6 - St. Nicholas Day

I am not sure that I’ve written about this day before, but it is a big one here in Poland.

On December 6 children receive presents from St. Nicholas. Thus the date is Mikolajki or St. Nick’s day.

This blog post tells a lot about it and is really nice. Let me share it with you.

To summarize - in the past, Polish children that were good (for all practical purposes, all children) received gifts and candy from St. Nicholas or Mikolaj - which is the Polish version of Nicholas. In the long past this was completely separate from Christmas and THIS is the day children received presents - not the 24th or 25th.

However, due to the western influences, children now receive presents on the 24th PLUS the 6th. I did notice when our children were in school that they sometimes got a gift in school - we gave money towards it - and all the kids in the classroom got the same thing - usually a stuffed animal as they were inexpensive.

Nowadays, Polish parents generally give their well-behaved children smallish presents on the 6th and save the larger ones for later in the month. Naturally, all children are well-behaved on this day. I’ve never heard of any child NOT getting presents because of behavior. Poverty, yes.

Because we aren’t Polish, it is hard to say how it works in Polish homes, which is why I appreciated the blog post linked above. I only observed what people were buying in the stores.

They sell a lot of St. Nicholas Christmas ornaments, made locally in our town. LOTS. They are all gorgeous.

The two shown above are being sold in the auction where they are raising money for sick children from our town. Aren’t they pretty? I can try to remember to see what they sell for this year and let you know. I think you can get them quite reasonably right from the manufacturer. Sadly, they don’t travel well and as such I don’t like to take them to the states in my luggage as gifts.

In the stores there are a lot of chocolate Santas - varying from quite inexpensive and not that great of chocolate to quite nice and tasty chocolates. Gingerbread cookies are always popular in Poland but at this time, apparently the Santa shaped ones are even more popular. I’m not a huge fan, so generally don’t purchase too many gingerbread cookies of any shape. I mean, to me they fall right in the 5/10 category of cookies. :)

THIS year it all has more meaning to me.

OK - I’ll be transparent here. When our children were home we did not celebrate this day. It was just too much. We had 5 children I think we may have gotten the kids a candy bar once I realized that all the other kids in school were getting stuff. I told our children we just couldn’t do it too, in addition to Christmas. We did not teach them that Santa Claus was real. St. Nick didn’t bring our kids any presents at all. All presents came from my husband and I or churches who sent things.

Anyway….

Back to the significance of this day.

After our quilt give-away - I had the lady who is my contact from the social agency, Ula, ask me if she could have any quilts for her when she goes to poor children’s homes with bags of candy. She could give out the quilts that were leftover from the give-away to those families.

So, why not? This Wed. Ula will be going to those people and passing out the remaining quilts shown below. I think there were 17 here. This also completed the give-away. You can be sure these will be used and loved.

And that’s why THIS year St. Nicholas day means more to me than before.

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

Thanks so much for coming along with me on this journey.

Becky Petersen6 Comments