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
A Christmas Eve deals heavily with the exploration of vanity, this time the vanity of a trashy prostitute and a young man obsessed with his dead sibling. And sharing a similarity with Boito's earlier work "The Body", the tale delves heavily into necrophilia, made only more disturbing with the connotations of incest, since Giorgio's obsession with Emelia is sexual. Since Giorgio is psychologically disturbed and suffering from a painful illness and delusional fantasies, "A Christmas Eve" can also be described an example of a short story with an unreliable narrator. A short film adaptation, updated to 1945 and titled "Christmas Eve '45" (in