Most people have their fondest childhood memories attached to Christmas. Mine are to Easter.

Don’t get me wrong, winter is my favorite season and I adore Christmas. But Easter had different traditions. Family traditions. Old family traditions. Ones that were complete apart from my elementary schoolmates. I mean everyone had a Christmas tree, but no one else I knew went to the Broadway Market to secure the food for their święconka which would be eaten after Easter Sunday Mass.

My grandmother, back in the day, went to the Broadway Market regularly, back when it had live chickens and such. But there was never a lot of time for reminiscing. We were on a mission!

Gram would stand in line at the meat counter while Mom would take me and my brother around the market to get the rest of our goods — rye bread, cross bread, placek (a Polish coffee cake made with yeast), horseradish and pierogi. We’d end up at Dorothy’s stand (a.k.a. to us as the “chicken lady”) who always hooked Gram up with a chicken (hence the nickname) and our butter lambs. (As a child it seemed like Gram and Dorothy talked FOR-EV-ER. As an adult, I’d love to know what those conversations were about.)

After Gram died, Mom and I continued the tradition, going to the Broadway Market every Holy Week — early in the week and early in the day to avoid crowds and people who came for the “experience” rather than a mission. This is my first Easter without Mom. And while the Broadway Market is open, I’m not willing to risk extra store runs during the COVID-19 pandemic, which means I’m playing Stella The Polish-American Housewife this week, preparing as many of the traditional pieces to our Holy Week and Easter meal as possible.

I went through my recipe book, which is really just a binder with a lot of pages from magazines ripped out and various printouts from food websites. I also have a small collection of my mom’s recipes in her own handwriting. Those were the ones I was looking for and luckily I found them.

Or maybe not so lucky.

My mom had two placek recipes written down on loose-leaf paper. One required 2/3 of a 2 ounce yeast cake. How do you measure that? And if I could figure that out, this is not the time for complicated math. The other recipe did not have any measurements for flour. “Add enough to make a light dough” to start and then later you add some more flour. There also is something that looks like “spry” in the recipe which I never heard of before.

I looked to the heavens and let out a loud “NOT HELPFUL KATH” to my mom’s spirit.

This placek recipe situation is not unexpected given that my mom never made placek and her mom never got along with yeast. “I remember a lot of placek that ended up in the trash,” my mom told me once. Gram used a “cheater” recipe, which really is just a coffee cake that you can bake in a loaf pan. Thanks to a recipe my uncle found, that’s what we’re going to do this year.

But we kicked off the week-long cooking festivities with pierogi. It’s not a traditional part of the Easter Sunday breakfast, but my mom and I would have pierogi for dinner on Good Friday. Nothing like loading up on carbs and cheese fried in butter when you only have one big meal that day.

First, a word about my mom and pierogi. (Which to this day I don’t say the way she did and somewhere she is cursing the way I’m saying it in my head as I type this.) Mom had very specific requirements about her pierogi. To begin with, farmer’s cheese was the only kind. On occasion, sauerkraut was acceptable as well. But for all you potato-filled pierogi lovers, Ma had no time for you.

She also liked them a bit doughy. Fry them up so the outside gets crisp, but extra dough along the outside is what she really loved.

We made them only once together and I was a bit nervous about going it alone. I was without my usual kitchen helpers as my husband and step-daughter are great in the kitchen. So we put all the ingredients on the table and just took it step by step.

I made the dough, let it rest, then made the filling, remembering that the last time we made them they turned out a bit too salty. So I reduced the amount of salt this time.

I rolled out the dough a piece at a time on a small cutting board. In preparation, I had watched a few videos of people making pierogi and they all cut out circles, then filled the center with filling, stretching the dough over the filling and pressing it closed. This didn’t seem like the way mom and I did it, but I tried it. I became a bit nervous because sealing them is the trick. The dough and filling are easy to make. Rolling out the dough isn’t that difficult either. It’s sealing the pierogi, making sure none of the filling gets caught in the seal, that is tricky. If the filling does get caught, they will open up when boiled and explode all over the salted water. No one wants that.

I was a bit uncertain about my sealing technique. Then I read my mom’s instructions again — place filling on the dough, fold over, and use a glass to cut into half moons. Ah-ha! I tried this method and they seemed to seal pretty well immediately. And they were a little bit plumper with dough — just how I remember them!

The next step is to put the pierogis into boiling water, cooking until they float. This was the first moment of truth. NO BUSTED PIEROGIS! My seals worked via both methods.

The second moment of truth came when I fried one up for lunch. And it was perfect.

I danced around the kitchen. I called my brother. I texted my uncle.

There is still bread and coffee cake to make (we do love our carbs on Easter). I have to pick up the fresh Polish sausage I ordered (curbside delivery from a vendor at The Broadway Market) and boil that. I never found Easter egg dye in the grocery store, but I did find a way to make some natural colors at home, so that project will take place later in the week. Then it all needs to come together — a small basket for my husband, a basket to eat with my dad on Easter Sunday and enough goodies in the refrigerator for my father-in-law to enjoy.

But for now, I am reveling in this triumph.

The tradition may be altered slightly. But then again, it always is altered. In small ways with each passing year, with each new generation putting its modern-day spin on the classics, which were never classics to begin with. Spring is here. Hope remains.

As we say in our family on Easter Sunday: Wesołego Alleluja!