Today is Christmas Eve, and for Menia Mustakis of East Lyme, the day's significance is marked with food.

Mustakis, a member of St. Sophia Hellenic Orthodox Church in New London, observes a 40-day pre-Christmas fast, as do many Orthodox Christians as a way to achieve spiritual reflection.

Christmas Eve is the fast's final day, and the custom in parts of Greece, including Mustakis' native Epirus, is to eat a traditional fasting bread. Mustakis brought the recipe and the ritual when she immigrated in 1993.

Other Greek food traditions have found their way across the Atlantic and are observed over Christmas and New Year's in many Greek-American homes. They largely involve pastries, some of the same ones that delight the crowds at St. Sophia's food festival every November. Others are less familiar to non-Greeks.

Since Nov. 15, Mustakis has been abstaining from dairy, eggs and meat, though she said the practice varies in terms of both duration and what to avoid. She gets by on simple things like oatmeal and peanut butter and jelly.

Today she and her family will observe the fast's final day with "stavros," a traditional bread made with only flour, water and yeast. Stavros (the name means "cross") is strictly a Christmas Eve food, she said, eaten on no other day of the year.

Earlier this month, Mustakis and another parishioner, Erica Krikonis of Niantic, used St. Sophia's spacious kitchen to make stavros and other holiday foods in a demonstration for this story. The fasting bread was a round loaf with a decorative cross dividing the top into four quarters, each one garnished with an almond.

Mustakis said the custom is for the family to gather on Christmas Eve, cut the stavros and eat it with a glass of wine. The first piece is for Jesus, she said, the second for the poor, and the rest for family members, who are served oldest to youngest.

A regional tradition, it has survived in its new American setting and is alive and well with her children.

"They ask for it every year," she said. "Slowly, I'm passing down the recipes."

Another seasonal food tailored for fasting is a favorite called melomakarona. It's a cookie made with honey, and the name comes from the words for "honey" and "blessed." St. Sophia festivalgoers know it in its nonfasting form, which is made with butter and eggs and called "finikia." Melomakarona uses olive oil instead, Mustakis said.

She and Krikonis made both melomakarona and another staple of the food festival, kourambiethes. An almond-flavored butter cookie covered in snow-white powdered sugar, it's eaten throughout Greece at Christmastime.

But many other treats vary by region of the country, depending on what's available, Mustakis said. For example, baklava, a popular dessert, wasn't eaten in Epirus, she said, because it's made with walnuts, which don't grow there. But walnuts were plentiful in Krikonis' home region of Evritania in Central Greece, so she grew up with the honey-laden pastry.

Main dishes at Christmas are less tradition-bound, Mustakis said. People may eat beef, pork or, in an American influence, turkey. Drinks also vary and include wine, a brandy called tsipouro, and the ever-popular ouzo, an anise-flavored liquor.

Greek holiday food customs don't end with Christmas. While Americans ring in the new year with eyes turned to Times Square, Greeks and many Greek-Americans watch a different kind of ball drop. They break a pomegranate outside their doors for luck. When the fruit's hard red shell cracks open, the seeds within scatter, symbolizing many blessings for the year ahead.

One of the most widespread traditions is a New Year's Day treat called vasilopita. Understanding its significance requires knowing the backstory.

In the fourth century, there was an early father of the Christian church called Basil of Caesarea. A bishop and theologian now revered as St. Basil the Great, he was known as a benefactor of the poor.

Legends about him vary but according to one story, when Caesarea was under siege, Basil collected donations of gold and jewels from residents of the city to pay off the attackers. People gave so much so willingly that the enemy was shamed into departing without collecting the treasure.

Basil then faced the happy dilemma of how to return everything to the donors. Not knowing who had given what, he had the coins and jewels baked into loaves of bread, which were distributed to the people. By a miracle, all received exactly what they had offered to end the siege.

From this tale comes the tradition of vasilopita, or "sweet bread of Basil." On New Year's Day, which is also St. Basil's Day, Greeks bake a bread with a coin inside. When the bread is cut, the family member who gets the piece with the coin has luck or blessings for the year. Like stavros, this is a one-day-a-year treat that varies by region.

For this story, Mustakis made a cake vasilopita that's customary in Epirus, as well as Athens and the Peloponnese in southern Greece. Flavored with yogurt and orange, it was covered in confectioner's sugar, with "2022" written in glaze.

In northern Greece, the Aegean islands and Constantinople (now the Turkish city of Istanbul), vasilopita is commonly tsoureki, a sweet bread also associated with Greek Easter.

Krikonis made a tsoureki vasilopita. Rolling dough between her palms, stretching it out, dropping it lightly on the table and repeating, she then arranged the elongated strands into a ring and covered it with plastic to let it rise. The result, a round bread with a bubbly top that glistened with egg wash, tasted similar to Portuguese sweet bread.

On visits to Greece, Krikonis said, she has brought back Greek coins to put in her vasilopita, though she noted that Greeks now use euros.

Originally a family tradition, vasilopita has spread to the public realm in Greece. Schools and businesses now observe the ritual, with the recipient of the coin also getting a gift, Mustakis said. And the practice of baking in coins for luck has also been used with other foods like stavros.

On this Christmas Eve, may the luck and blessings celebrated in Greek tradition be yours, today and throughout the year to come.

j.ruddy@theday.com