Christmas

Christmas in The Peasants is more than a date in the village calendar: it interrupts labor with a sacred communal pause, gathering households around worship, custom, food, and fellowship. Its central scene at Boryna’s house places the newly married Jagna within a household’s seasonal rites, while the wider village’s preparations and the rules surrounding songs and supper make the feast part of a shared religious order.

The feast in Lipce’s seasonal year

Christmas Eve begins in Lipce with feverish activity. The frost has returned after damp mists, glazing trees and freezing the roads; beyond the cottages, snow-covered fields lie almost empty. The village’s usual workday rhythm gives way to holiday preparation: rooms are washed and aired, pine needles are spread through houses, stoves are whitewashed, bread and sweet rolls are baked, and herring and poppy seeds are prepared. Even the mill has stopped for the holiday. The stillness outside and the bustle indoors mark Christmas as a deliberate suspension of ordinary labor.

The narration presents the feast as a blessed respite in long working days, lifting people out of winter’s numbness and turning their attention to the birth of Christ. That relief is not an escape from the season’s hardship: the air is so cold that breath clouds, and the frost bites through the day. Rather, the brightness of the holiday, the work of preparation, and the expectation of worship make a shared occasion within that severity.

Christmas also belongs to a longer festive span. The narrative identifies the stay of a visitor until Three Kings, or Epiphany, as a measure of how far the season extends. A note explains that village customs from Yuletide until Lent included going from house to house with a star, a Christmas crib, or a bear. Christmas therefore opens a stretch of public seasonal observance, not merely a private day at home.

Christmas at Boryna’s house

At Boryna’s, preparations bring the household’s members and guests into the same busy space. Boryna has gone to town before daybreak with Pietrek, whom he has taken on to look after the horses in Kuba’s place. Inside, Józka cuts colored paper decorations, while Jagna, with help from Dominikowa, kneads dough and makes long strudels. She must also keep watch over bread and cakes warming for the oven. The scene gives the feast a practical texture: its brightness is made by skilled, hurried labor, much of it performed by women.

The celebration also marks Jagna’s new position in the household. It is her first Christmas in her new home, and she is busy with its food and service. Boryna occasionally helps her, but an older woman tells him to sit down and let Jagna get used to her new place. The exchange makes household rank visible inside the warmth of preparation: the feast gathers people together without dissolving the expectations attached to their roles.

Not everyone follows the assigned work. Witek has been told to tend the oven, but instead he sets snares for partridges beyond the hayrick, accompanied by Łapa and the stork he rescued and cared for in autumn. Meanwhile, Rocho and Ambrozy decorate the church altars and walls with fir branches. These parallel activities link domestic preparations to public worship, while Witek’s diversion shows the village’s everyday creatures and habits continuing alongside the solemn occasion.

Supper, song, and shared observance

The Christmas Eve supper follows the discipline of the fast. The family and guests have eaten only dry bread during the day, and they take the meal slowly and with dignity. The dishes include beetroot soup with mushrooms and potatoes, fried herring, poppy-seed dumplings, cabbage and mushrooms, and buckwheat pancakes with honey. Bread accompanies the courses. Cake and strudel are withheld because they contain milk and butter, ingredients not fitting for the day’s observance. The specific food customs make religious restraint tangible at the table rather than leaving it as an abstract rule.

Rocho announces, “Time for supper, since the Word has become flesh!” Those present sit around the long bench, with Boryna at its head and Dominikowa and her sons among the guests. Jagna rises soon after sitting down because she must serve. The ordering of the meal expresses both hospitality and household hierarchy; the food is shared, but the work of carrying it remains hers. Its abundance is also measured against the day’s hunger, making the festive meal a brief change in ordinary scarcity rather than a rejection of it.

The night has its own sequence of sound. Before midnight, the household sings hymns, since carols are not sung earlier. Elsewhere in the house, Pietrek washes, changes out of his soldier’s garments, and puts on new clothes Jagna has brought from the storeroom. He explains that people had called him a mongrel, and the change lets him appear dressed like an ordinary peasant. The small episode places belonging and its vulnerability beside the larger rites: Christmas brings people together, but social acceptance remains something that can be questioned and sought.

Sacred time and the wider community

The novel’s Christmas customs make religious time audible and visible. The rule against carols before midnight sets a boundary within the night; the hymn singing and the supper prepare for the celebration of Christ’s birth. An explanatory note identifies the first Mass as the midnight Mass and explains that the Church allowed three Christmas Masses, at midnight, dawn, and during the day. The feast thus has an ordered liturgical progression as well as a domestic one.

Christmas also carries a cultural life beyond the events at Boryna’s table. The carol God Is Born, Great Powers Tremble is described in the notes as a Polish Christmas carol regarded by some as a national carol, and even briefly as a national anthem. Its lyrics were written in 1792, to a melody with an older coronation tradition. The detail connects local worship to a broader Polish cultural memory without erasing the particular village setting in which songs, food, and seasonal customs are practiced.

Across these observances, Christmas gives Lipce a shared measure of time and belonging. The closed mill, the decorated church, the fast, the meal, and the waiting for midnight all distinguish the feast from ordinary days. Yet the narrative keeps that sacred interval grounded in cold, work, household obligations, and uneven social standing. Its renewal is communal precisely because it is made from familiar acts repeated together: preparing, serving, praying, eating, and carrying the celebration onward through Yuletide.