Merry Xmas!

Hello everyone and.. Merry Christmas!! 

How are you? What do you expect from this day? Any special gift?  Well... I'm definitely without any ideas so.. I can't wait :) 

Today I would like to write something about Italian Christmas traditions. Most of them are very similar to the Polish ones but of course there are some differences. 

Like in all the Christian Countries, also in Italy the biggest tradition is the Christmas Tree, in italian Albero di Natale. Some families use a plastic one, but my family used to buy a real tree. In Italy is also very popular the crib. I have seen crips also in Poland but in Italy is not just a "decoration" for the city. In every house there is a very big crips, with lot of characters, trees, houses... sometimes is even bigger than the real Bethlem! When I used to live in Italy and I had a bigger house, every year we bought something new to expand ours. We had even some electronical devices to make the water flows and some characters moves. I enjoyed so much to build it! 

Another important tradition of Christmas is food. Like in Poland the main events are two: Eve's dinner and Christmas Lunch. Of course, neither in Italy is allowed to eat meat the 24th, so we cook some dishes based on fish like capitone (something similar to eel) or baccalà (salt cod*). I don't like so much fish (WHAT?! Nicola you are from Livorno, seaside...), so I actually prefer 25th. We cook cappone (a very big chicken), tortellini in brodo (broth*) or abbacchio (lamb). But.. above all, we have a lot of Xmas sweets! They are so good... now I'm on a diet so better to not think to much about them but... Pandoro is one of the things I miss more from Italy :D Is a typical cake from Verona (probably the best thing from there.. even better than Romeo and Giulietta, sorry Will), and it is often served dusted with vanilla-scented icing sugar made to resemble the snowy peaks of the Italian Alps during Christmas (Yeah, I catched that part from Wikipedia). 

So... Tradition are obviously more but... time and space is not enough. I have already another blog ready to post, I will do that in the next days. I hope that you enjoyed these curiosity about our traditions, and I wish all of you a very happy and peaceful Christmas. 

Nicola

* I hope that names make sense... For me sometimes is hard to remember those things in Italian, so  I will definitely trust everything I find on the Internet.