SCRANTON — Many will be sitting down to a traditional Christmas Eve fish dinner.
At one market in Lackawanna County, the shopping trip is just as much of a tradition as the meal itself.
Customers huddled under the awning to hide from the rain waiting to order seafood that was fresh and colder than the air outside Schiff’s in Scranton.
The rules are: take a number, and then take a minute to look over all that’s available.
“It’s just a family tradition, I come down here every Christmas Eve morning and we always get our fish from here and we will have our traditional Slovak/Polish Christmas Eve supper,” said Mary Ellen Pettinato of Simpson.
Pettinato says there are also some Italian influences in her Christmas Eve meal. That’s why she stops at the outdoor fish market. And with our melting pot of a community, there are a lot of seafood combinations on customers’ menus.
“Shrimp and lobster and kielbasa, and yeah we get everything here. We buy all our meats here, great place,” said Rick Franko of Dalton.
It was so busy at Schiff’s during the outdoor fish market that they needed someone out there directing traffic all week.
“Today is actually pretty mild. We had four lanes of traffic in here yesterday. Actually they were out in the road, we couldn’t get them in fast enough,” said Jim Reese.
Reese, his brother, and a few others help out at Schiff’s the week before Christmas and before New Year’s. He says Christmas Eve is often the calmest of those days. For times when it’s busier, their direction helps ease drivers’ holiday frustration.
“We got people asking us, ‘why don’t you go to the mall or go to Wal-Mart?’ We have only had a few fender bender, and we try to get them out as fast as we can and 90 percent of the people are pretty good,” Reese said.
After all, it’s tough to be in a bad mood when a good meal is hours away.
The folks at Schiff’s say scallops and shrimp are the biggest sellers for Christmas.
