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.)
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.
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.”
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.