Christmas comes to the Hickman's

On Sunday afternoon we took an outing to buy our Christmas tree (Polish:choinka). It was rather an adventurous trip to a garden centre up the road travelling on the 709 bus together with Audrey in her pram and a few dozen Poles. The air onboard the bus was heavy with a myriad of cold and flu viruses.

The 'Obi' store we went to was similarly busy, as people scrambled to buy plastic angels and red flock coated Father Christmas figurines direct from China.

I was pleased in a way, as up until this point I had been rather disappointed by the Polish attitude to Christmas. I've noticed that (unlike the UK) they didn't fill their shops with tinsel on the 1st November and it was possible to look around almost all of the stores in Warsaw without your ears being affronted by Paul McCartney on the in-store sound system chirpily hoping you were having a 'won-der-ful Christ-mas-time'. It was almost as though the Poles regard Christmas as if it were some kind of religious festival.

We struggled back home, complete with tree, potted poinsettia, pram and baby.

Our apartment now has the look of a winter wonderland. We've got some nice dec's including some real Polish ones bought for us last year by our Polish teacher Ewa. It's probably the last time for a few years we are able to have decorations on the bottom few branches of the tree.

I did record an early casualty - a red bauble which smashed somewhere down the back of the sofa, shards of which Audrey will probably find when she starts to crawl in a few months time - perhaps I should have invested in bounce-resistant plastic baubles from Obi.