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 (opera) Christmas Eve (opera) Christmas Eve (, "Noch' pered Rozhdestvom"), is an opera in four acts with music and libretto by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Composed between 1894 and 1895, Rimsky-Korsakov based his opera on a short story, "Christmas Eve", from Nikolai Gogol's "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka". The story had been used as the basis for an opera at least three times previously, including for Tchaikovsky's "Vakula the Smith" (1874). Oliver Knussen writes that "Rimsky is only interested in recreating the atmosphere of the folk-tale, fleshing it out for his stage pageant in a comparable way to Humperdinck in "Hansel". Gerald