Where have you been?

OC_Photography wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We don't actually discriminate here so Happy Chanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule or whatever else you and your family celebrate. We will be enjoying a traditional Polish Christmas with my girlfriend's family. Over the next week I will post photos describing a few Polish holidays.


One question I have naturally been receiving is "What do the decorations in America/Poland look like?" Actually they are pretty similar. Christmas trees, mistletoe, wreathes, stars, crosses, angeles, etc. One difference is the American use of stockings, Poles don't, as a general rule, do stockings. There are not too many individual homes in Warsaw, mostly large blocks of apartments, so lights on houses are not too common either. We have in-door lights, paper snowflakes, and a little Christmas tree in our flat. Here are some photos of my girlfriend and Kobra decorating our tree.


The translation of the Polish version of "to decorate the Christmas tree" is "to dress the Christmas tree". That sort of implies that the tree was naked before you put on the decorations!


Kobra was pretty intersted in the tree and the blubs. I think this was his first Christmas with a family so he was pretty excited about the strange things going on. He is a pretty well behaved cat so we only needed to yell at him three or four times to leave the tree alone.

When the tree was first decorated he was super intersted. "It smells nice, taste nice, and if you hit the red things they swing," he said. "Is this a new toy for me?"