Christmas Market prep and Holubki making!

The St. Mary’s Women’s Club Christmas market and Women’s Club sponsored coffee hour is just a few days away!  The sale will include assorted breads: cheese, poppyseed, nut, and apricot bread.  We will also have Christmas cookies, other assorted baked goods, perohi, holubki, Russian tea, and specialty coffees for sale.

Our parish kitchen has already been a flurry of excitement and activity as we start the prep work for the big baking day.  An email has been sent to all of our members with a timeline of baking activities, coffee hour needs and requests for volunteers. All of our members are asked to help bake bread on Saturday, bake on their own for the bake sale/coffee hour or pay the $20 donation stipulated by our club bylaws. We also placed a notice in the church bulletin asking anyone and all to come help us make bread! Skilled bakers, novice bakers, come and learn from those of us who have been doing this forever!

Does the thought of the holidays approaching give you anxiety? Maybe it makes you a little bit sad? Them come to baking day and roll nut bread with some of our Babas. They've lived through almost everything (!) and they can be very good listeners.  Good conversation while spreading apricot filling can be so soothing to the soul. You can bring all your questions about how to keep gravy from forming lumps as well! So, come and bake bread with us! There’s a place for you at our table.

The holubki prep took place this past Wednesday and Thursday.  Take a look at our wonderful crew and their set-up!  As our president commented, “we are only doing 300, so it’s quite manageable.” If we have any readers that attend a smaller Orthodox mission parish and you want to learn how to make 300 holubki, please reach out to us.

We had a small hiccup with our cabbages. They were beautiful produce, but unfortunately, did not yield as many rollable leaves once boiled.  We will prepare more cabbage leaves this week and finish up. Sometimes that happens when you’re making holubki!  Ninety-nine remaining meat rolls were frozen awaiting their cabbage leaves.

Thursday evening, following the Women’s Club meeting, we packaged up the 5 roaster pans of cooked holubkis for freezing. 

Baking day and coffee hour were planned at our meeting tonight. Table configurations, room planning and work assignments were decided. This is one of our biggest fundraisers for the year.  That’s all for now.  We are so excited! 

In Christ,
The St. Mary’s Women’s Club