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
Kalach (food) "kalashnik" (калашник) due to the sandhi effect. Such a man's descendants might be given the surname "Kalachnikov" (Калачников) or "Kalashnikov" (Калашников, "[son] of the kalach-maker"). Ukrainian kolaches are made by braiding dough made with wheat flour into ring-shaped or oblong forms. They are a symbol of luck, prosperity, and good bounty, and are traditionally prepared for "Svyat Vechir (Holy Supper)", the Ukrainian Christmas Eve ritual, most often in the form of three round bread loaves stacked one atop the other with a candle in the middle. In the area around Kiev, it was custom for a midwife to give a