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 Eve American commerce and society is not functioning, and which can give rise to a sense of loneliness or alienation for American Jews. Jews also typically do not engage in the family gathering and religious worship activities that are central to Christmas Eve for Christians. Typical contemporary activities have usually been limited to "Chinese and a movie"—consuming a meal at a Chinese restaurant, which tend to be open for business on the Christmas holiday, and watching a movie at the theater or at home, stereotypically a rerun of "It's a Wonderful Life". Since the 1980s a variety of social events for