Christmas dinner most Poles spend the day feasting with their family. The Christmas meal is elaborate, served in the evening on 24 December, offering large quantities of food. This Christmas Eve meal is called Wigilia. After the first star appears in the sky, everyone shares the Christmas wafer (opłatek) and wishes good things for the coming year. Then supper begins. The meal is meatless, honouring Catholic tradition. Many households also prepare a great variety of special Christmas dishes, typically numbering 12 in honor of the 12 apostles. Dishes include: stuffed carp, fried carp, herring in wine sauce, herring in cream sauce, fruit
Christmas in Ukraine a vase are often used to decorate the table. Shopka is a traditional portable nativity scene used to represent nativity and other figures in a puppet form. "Kutia, Star of the Ukrainian Christmas Eve Supper" Kylymnyk, Stepan, 1955–1969; "Ukrainskyi Rik u Narodnykh Zvychayakh v Narodnomu Osvitlenni" [Ukrainian Year in Folk Customs from Historical Perspective], Winnipeg, Toronto Tracz, Orysia 2015, "First Star I See Tonight", Mazepa Publications Zhuravli, Winnipeg "Ukrainian Christmas Traditions", Ukrainian International Directory Voropai, Oleksa 1958, "Zvychai Nashoho Narodu" [Customs of Our People], Ukrainske Vydavnytstvo, Munich Yakovenko, Svitlana 2016, "Ukrainian Christmas Eve Supper: Traditional village recipes for Sviata Vecheria",