My first Christmas Eve in Poland, I was invited to a friend's house to celebrate. It was 1992, and though I had been teaching in Poland for six months, most of my time had been spent around other ex-pat Americans. This was my first real Polish holiday, and I had looked forward to it eagerly.

My friend, Anna, was a student at the university where I taught. Anna lived with her parents in a Soviet-era apartment block a few miles outside of Poznan, Poland. When I arrived on Christmas Eve, I couldn't believe how cramped the apartment was. Three rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom were crowded to overflowing with her grandparents, great-grandparents, and other assorted relations. What everyone lacked in space and comfort was more than made up for in the sheer joy of the occasion.

I was taken aback from the first at how much tradition there was. Christmas Eve in Polish Catholic tradition is a fasting meal, so the primary dish was fish. There were twelve dishes in total to represent the twelve apostles. An empty dish was left to seat any traveler lost and alone who might knock hungrily at the door. The father of the house read the Gospel account from Luke before the meal was served.

About halfway through the meal, the father of the house turned to me and asked me, in Polish, what we did to celebrate Christmas in America. My mind raced for an answer. I spluttered some, and then finally told the truth.

Well, at least the truth as I had experienced it growing up as a Protestant fundamentalist in South Georgia.

"Nothing," I said with a shrug of the shoulders, "Not really much of anything."

Everyone exploded with laughter and began to chide me about my answer.

So I tried to do better. I explained that we ate dinner on Christmas Eve with the family. Usually we had turkey, but other people had ham. Sometimes we had ham also. What people ate really varied. After dinner, we opened presents. On Christmas Day, we slept in and then had lunch. After that, we usually played with our new stuff. Some people watched a parade on TV on Christmas, but my family never got into that.

"Do the kids hang out outside on Christmas Eve and wait for the first star?" someone asked.

"Uh, no," I answered.

"Well, what do you do at church?" my friend Anna asked.

"We don't go to church," I ventured timidly.

"Aren't you Christians?" Anna's father asked incredulously.

"Well, yes, but we don't go to church on Christmas Eve or Christmas."

"What if Christmas is on a Sunday?" my friend's mom asked.

"Oh, they normally cancel church so people can stay home with their families," I said hesitantly.

Everyone had a good laugh at this.

"Didn't any of you ever considering doing something Christian on Christmas?" my friend's ancient great-grandmother asked.

With that we changed the topic to other things. A few hours later, we all went to midnight mass at the local Catholic Church. Everyone from the neighborhood was there. As we walked, there were greetings all around. Old friends, distant relations, everyone joined together walking on the way to the Mass. As we arrived, we found the church packed to capacity, and even though we were early, we had to stand in a corner in the back.

The church was bathed in light and as I stared around my jaw went slack. I watched all these people, happily joining together with their neighbors as one to welcome the birth of Christ. I thought about the fact that the customs I had just experienced had been practiced almost the same way in millions of Polish households around the country. And, these traditions had been handed down for hundreds of years.

Standing amid all that joy, I found myself engulfed in sadness. I was sad because of what my upbringing had taken from me. I was sad at what the Calvinist roots of America's Christianity had stripped from us as a people. There were English Christmas traditions enshrined in the Anglican Church, but Christmas as a holiday was actively suppressed in New England. All those traditions were lost in the past, never to be recovered.

I was sad because there is no unity in diversity. There is only chaos. There is no American Christmas. There are Americans who have Christmas traditions, some of which are quite beautiful and even quite elaborate. But whatever is done varies from family to family, from place to place, from religious tradition to religious tradition, and from church to church. We don't have a culture in this regard so much as an absence of one.

Which is why I have always embraced Polish Christmas traditions in our home. I do this partly to make my Polish wife happy, but also because I never had anything else to offer. Prior to becoming Orthodox, it was either celebrate Christmas Polish-style or don't celebrate it any meaningful way at all.

We have modified the Polish traditions over time, because converting to Orthodoxy has required changes. We keep the traditional Polish foods, but our Christmas Eve starts earlier and we go to church on Christmas Day, instead of just at midnight as in the Catholic tradition.

Having experienced all this gives me a perspective most Americans don't have. Which is why talk radio gives me such as chuckle this time of year. I often listen to talk radio on my way to and from the office. Starting in late November, the airwaves are dominated by Evangelicals calling in complaining about the war on Christmas in this country. This is usually prompted by some city or other banning Nativity scenes in a park or something of the kind.

What seems to have escaped the notice of these culture warriors is that millions of Catholics and Orthodox alive today have lived through an actual war, not only on Christmas, but on the Christian faith altogether. We have seen nothing in the U.S. like the enforced atheism that existed behind the Iron Curtain.

Yet the Poles and the other peoples came out of this persecution triumphant. The faith of a people is sustained by their traditions. Traditions provide warmth, comfort, and unity. The Orthodox and Catholic churches have always understood this. This cocoon of tradition and identity has helped preserved the holy Christian faith through the long dark nights of Muslim and communist persecution. The ACLU types are welcome to take a crack, but after the failure of the Bolsheviks, I wouldn't bet on their success.

But, of course, the Christmas traditions in Orthodoxy and Catholicism are really practiced in the home and in Church. These are beyond the reach of the ACLU, just as they were beyond the reach of the Communists. With Christ at your table, it matters little if the town square has a Nativity scene or a tank in the center of it.

A people deprived of such meaningful, unifying traditions will not survive. One reason that American Evangelicalism is struggling is that it has no such traditions of its own. Evangelicals have Nativity scenes in public parks and public Christmas concerts in the town square. But these are being taken away - and with them gone what is left?

I think Evangelicals are sensing this void. I have noticed that more churches are organizing Christmas Eve candlelight services. Some churches appear to be organizing events for Christmas Day, and I even noticed a book or two on Christmas celebrations for the home in Evangelical bookstores. These churches seem to be making a real effort to go beyond a Christmas play and towards meaningful worship tied to the Feast of the Nativity.

It is good that they at least understand the need for something deeper and more spiritual than a plastic baby Jesus down by City Hall. But I hold out very little chance for the success of their efforts. Liturgical churches can pass down and preserve traditions over the course of thousands of years. Non-liturgical churches can not even remain stable over the course of a single lifetime. Whatever they invent today, will be forgotten by the time today's tots have outgrown the Christmas presents they will receive this year.

For a truly American holiday tradition to exist, a liturgical Church must consciously take charge of its formation and preservation. I see the Orthodox Church as a natural fit for this role. For this to occur, however, the hierarchs of the various jurisdictions in America must actively encourage the formation of an American holiday tradition grounded in Holy Orthodoxy, but allowed to be distinct from the traditions of the Orthodox nations.

We have a great start, as Orthodoxy has a complete set of traditions to draw from. We could help complete the process of transforming and stabilizing American culture by incorporating Western hymns, which are Orthodox-compatible, into our own usage. At the end of our parish play one Sunday in early December, the children sang several well-known Western hymns. The parish joined them in singing. Everyone knew the songs, even most immigrants.

I have been Orthodox since 2000, but to this day I can not sing a single Orthodox Christmas Hymn. But, "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" rolls easily off my tongue, as it does off the tongues of all native-born Americans.

Americans often feel isolated and alone, never more so than at Christmas, as our cultural emptiness and fragmentation are even more evident at that time than any other. Orthodoxy is the curative for this. Our role is to honor the traditions of our Church by keeping them in our own lives, and by sharing them with non-Orthodox Americans, even if it is only by greeting our neighbors with a hearty, "Christ is born!"

Glen Chancy is CIO for corfun.com and publisher of Orthodox Biz. You can contact him here .

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 [Celebrating Christmas with Nothing]

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