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Six and Jaselka

Sunday 16 December 2012

Today our daughter turned six.

“When exactly?” the Girl asked during breakfast.

“About an hour and forty-one minutes ago,” K laughed. It seems that little more than that hour and forty-some minutes has passed since then — certainly not six years. Certainly not 2,191 days. In hours, it seems even more daunting: 52,594.

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Our day ended with the Polish community’s traditional Christmas pageant. The Girl played an angel, and K and the Boy were Mary and Jesus — a Baby Jesus who already sits and claps, and squeals.

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And so the Christmas season feels as if it’s officially begun.

The performance from 2011 is here.
The performance from 2010 is here.

Polska Choinka

Sunday 9 December 2012

For most of K’s life, her family had an artificial Christmas tree. Christmas tree farms were nonexistent in Poland, and if one wanted a tree, one had to go to the forest oneself and cut it — after fulfilling the requisite paperwork for cutting a tree down. (Yes, it seems to me too that Poland has bureaucracy in place for everything.)

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The resulting tree was humble at best. The thick, almost-bushy fir trees of the States would have likely been an impossible dream. Instead, they were sparsely branched, humble trees.

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This afternoon, when K came home with the Christmas tree, she proudly proclaimed that she’d bought a “polska choinka.” With its relatively broadly spaced branches, it looked about as much like a Polish Christmas tree as one is likely to find in the States.

“And it was only $20!” she added with a smile. “I saved us $20 and got us a Polish tree.”

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It seemed only right, then, to leave the decoration to those who had Polish blood — or at least that excuse seemed logical at the time.