Warm greetings to all the Mularia.

Christmas is coming and even if the pandemic rages and limits it, as much as we can we all try to recreate that atmosphere that has accompanied it since its birth. Christmas, here in the Village, was almost always accompanied by snow and if it wasn't snowing it was foggy and cold, but snow and fog and cold didn't stop the girls from hunting for stockfish and cod. The days before Christmas Eve it was fragrant and the air was filled with a thousand inviting smells. As you entered the Village you got drunk and an incessant hammering grabbed your ears: it was the girls who pounded the stockfish on the granite stakes, placed as deterrents between the gardens and the houses. In turn, very civilly, they armed themselves with wooden pestles, placed the sword on the stake and beat it from one side to the other and the more she was angry with her husband or with some bow that had made her bazilar, the more the sword frayed. Needless to say, the cats were lying in wait but, if you know, one of our women, even weighing 100 kilos, to defend the sword became more agile than the cats and none of them, to my memory, has ever managed to steal a single touch of weight.

The oresgnazza

At my house, dad would start asking on the first of December: “Norma, will you make stockfish with potatoes, busara, sarma, oresgnazza for Christmas Eve?” It was a prayer, almost a plea, because for him in particular, Christmas was Fiume and everything it reminded him of, starting with eating.

Mare and all the other babes used to prepare the oresgnazza two days before: she peeled them and ground their noses, kneaded them, let the dough rise and made lots of ostriches that she then baked at night, when we were all asleep… But how could she sleep with those smells. We collapsed exhausted more from the unsatisfied mouth watering than from sleep and in the morning, when we woke up, the hope was to catch at least a little preview. But no way: just as she made them with the cats for the stockfish, she made them with us for the oresgnazza.

Men sent to bars

Once the sweets were made (the mare also made two ostriches of strudel), by now it was Christmas Eve, and from early in the morning she would start cooking sarme, busara, stockfish with potatoes. If Christmas Eve was a working day, the fathers would come out of the factory a few hours earlier. Otherwise he was at home and then, to avoid making them struggle for the kitchen, most of the time he would come straight to the bar to play cards or have a chat with friends, or to take the children out. There! The Angel didn't like to hang around with the children very much, also because (the mother said), being so terrible, she didn't give him a push and once when he took me out with a pretty pink dress with white polka dots, that his sister, a dressmaker, aunt Mafalda, had made for me, I came back alone, all covered in mud, with the new dress chafed and my knees covered in spiderwebs. He also said that I had escaped from his hand and that he had found me climbing up a tree, behind the house, trying to see the birds' nests. In short, he didn't have the heart to give me a disgrace, as my mother had hoped and from then on, with my father he never sent me out again. So dad would go to the bar and since the sea knew his weaknesses well, which he called “tourneè”, he would put a note in his pocket with his name, surname and address, in case one too many glasses of wine ruined his drink (never happened, but at least that way he could laugh).

The most precious thing in the world

Of course it is true, however, that when he met up with his old friends (Carlo, Dario, Pili and Peppi), the way home was always strewn with “let's go again for a sluk”. Christmas Eve began at 19.30:XNUMX pm. Grandma Maria always came to our house too and we all gathered around that rectangular table, in that poor little house, heated by a coal stove, with a single bedroom, a tiny kitchen, an equally tiny bathroom, on the fourth floor of a block of flats that, like all the others in the Village, was built with all the possible theft (in vogue even then and especially to our detriment). Well, around that table in that poor house, where eating was never lacking, all of us warm, we gave the most precious thing in the world: a family that with all its difficulties and limitations, transmitted an unforgettable love and warmth! Happy Holidays to everyone from the heart.

Maria Gabriella Macini
Source: The Voice of the People – 05/12/2021