Click Here to Return to Milestones
The days following the Thanksgiving holiday were filled with gentle anticipation and accelerated preparations for Christmas. It was a joyous time when life was simpler, and centered strongly around the traditions of "la famiglia" --one's family, both immediate and extended.
The weeks of buying and preparing special foods culminated in the traditional Christmas Eve dinner, a sumptuous feast that signaled the beginning of the twelve days of Christmas festivities. Dinner began around six o'clock, and each course was served leisurely. Conversation flowed freely, and, as the meal progressed through its many courses, became more than a little animated until it reached, it seemed to my childish ears, a mighty crescendo.
The meal began with an antipasto of delicately flavored fish and vegetables, topped by Italian olives, mushrooms, and fennel. This was followed by a fish soup made of calamaro, and the dinner unfolded in a panorama of special courses that appeared on an annual basis.
Nothing in the meal was prepared with animal fat, nor did it include any meat. Instead, it included a variety of pastas and fish, the favorite perhaps being the tiny smelts, rolled in seasoned flour and dropped in hot oil until they became deliciously crisp. A stew and a salad made of baccala (dried cod fish) were always tastily prepared.
Lupini, a kind of dried bean, was a staple, not only at the Christmas Eve dinner, but throughout the holiday season. Soaked in a salted water for days, they were eaten in much the same way as one eats popcorn or peanuts. The fun for the children came when they popped their bean from the shell ( which were never eaten) and sometimes used as "guided missiles" in the games that were played. Of course, this never happened at the dinner table. Censure would have been quick to follow.
The meal closed with a variety of dolci, sweets of regional variety and taste. The perennial favorite was the pizzelle, a delicately flavored waffle that, it seems to me, has become a favorite of many people-not just Italian -Americans.
By nine-thirty in the evening, the festive dinner was over, and after the clean-up duties were complete, the family prepared to go to Midnight Mass, always spiritually and seasonally beautiful . This service ushered in our twelve days of Christmas, which would end on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany.
Our parents would always remind us that this feast was more important to them when they were children in their native villages in the mountains of Abruzzo, Italy than Christmas itself. Gifts, if indeed there were any, were exchanged then, not on December 25th. The most poignant memory they had of Christmas itself was that of the eve of the Hold Day. Poor in material things, they looked forward to the shepherds who came down from the hills on Christmas Eve, playing on the zampognara, a kind of bagpipe indigenous to the peasants. They sentimentally sang some of the folk tunes to recall times long past.
A particularly lovely melody was the haunting "Tu Scende dalle Stelle" ("From Starry Skies Thou Comest"). While the text sometimes varies according to region, the most widely known lyrics are those attributed to Alfonso Liguori in the eighteenth century. Translated:
George Friedrich Handel heard this melody, among many others, in a visit to Italy. In 1724 he produced what many believe to be the most powerful oratorio ever written, Messiah. The beautiful instrumental interlude that follows the exultant "For Unto Us a Child is Born" is the meditative "Pastoral Symphony:. It has been described as "the portrayal of the Nativity by muted strings in a gentle melody which Handel had heard thirty years earlier in Calabria and had never forgotten" That melody was the bagpipers' carol "Tu Scende dalle Stelle". The song of the peasant has found a revered and hallowed setting enjoyed throughout the world.
Dr. Emma S. Rocco, associate professor of music at Penn State Beaver campus, has recently written a book, Italian WindBands: A Surviving Tradition in the Milltowns of Pennsylvania. The Book, is included in Garland's new series European Immigrants and American Society: A 28-Volume Collection of Studies and Dissertations.