Icetime (photos)

Ice and Light (photos)

A Mazurian Winter (photos)

A doe, a deer, a (hunted) female deer

On the first day of Christmas we drank. It was, come to think of it, a lot like most of the preceding days of non-Christmas and most of the following days. Also, I learned that the first day of Christmas is December 25. I had never actually considered that there are 12 days of Christmas. I still don’t know what’s important about the other 11. And I have no real idea why none of those days are as important for Poles as December 24, Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve, you see, is when everything happens – the decorating, the eating, the gift giving and the hunting, oh the hunting.

The family we were staying with has a Christmas Eve tradition in which the men get up early to go hunting for a doe (a deer, a female deer). Given that I was a man, and despite the fact I had been up late the night before with the other men and women drinking, I was invited to take part.

I didn’t actually have to shoot anything. Myself, Magda’s uncle and his son, who is about my age, headed out into the forest with one gun. The uncle would be the only person shooting anything. He’s the one with the hunting license after all and it probably wouldn’t look good for a forestry official to hand a gun to a Canadian tourist who’s only shot tin cans with a beebee gun before. Even if that beebee gun came from the Czech Republic.

For about an hour and a half we trekked around the woods, occasionally hunkering down in an Ambona (see photo below), tall hunting stans scattered around the forest, usually on the edge of clearings.

Eventually, the hunt turned Safari-esque and we rode around in a miniature Suzuki truck looking for does. Finally spotting one in a clearing, the uncle got out, steadied himself and took a shot. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your affinity for deer) he missed, leaving us to return home empty handed.

Yesterday, I now recall, I may have suggested that Polish Christmas traditions are somehow more consistent than North American traditions. I may have been wrong. Point number one: Poles don’t eat red meat on Christmas Eve. The main dish is fish, fish and more fish, as I’ll explain in the next post. Deer, of course, constitute red meat and so can’t be eaten on Christmas Eve. Hunted though? Of course.

Rejoice, Christmas is over

Well, Santa or St. Nickolai, as they say here (and probably spell differently), has gone back into hibernation, taking with him all his Christmas carols, decorations and confusing traditions.

Woo hoo.

Of course, I say that every year, especially about the confusing traditions. In fact, in Poland at least, all the traditions seem to make at least a little bit of sense. This Christmas season, (because at this point Christmas has become more a season than a holiday or even a holiday season) was obviously different from most I experienced.

First, we spent this Christmas (and New Years’ Eve) in Poland’s Mazurian Forest, where Magda’s uncle is a forestry official. The forest is located in the Mazury region of Poland, in the country’s north-east and close to the Russian border (If you squint hard at a map you will notice that Russia owns a small block of land just east of the Baltic Sea and just north of Poland’s eastern quarter). Magda’s aunt and uncle live in a sometimes-guesthouse on a large tract of land a few kilometres outside of Czerwony Dvor. We stayed at the guesthouse for most of our stay.

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But there is a lot to write about so first things first, the forest.

This ‘ent your typical British Columbian third-growth forest. First, it’s relatively flat. While Mazury boasts more hills than Saskatchewan(!), they reach distinctly Saskatchewan-like heights. That means that if, say, you went hiking in the woods and got turned around, you can’t just look at your position in regards to the nearest large hill.

As for the trees, the forest is extremely managed. Part of this likely has to do with the fact that, by Canadian standards it is both small in terms of pure overall size and large in terms of the percentage of wood it contributes to Polish and European lumber needs. (I have no stats whatsoever to back myself up in this regard.) This translates into sections of forest that are very different. One section may contain almost exclusively spruce while another is populated by hardwoods. At ground level you can walk around easily because most underbrush has been cleared (I would guess, for firewood). In other words, a walk in the woods here doesn’t require a machete.

The forest, also, isn’t entirely a forest. There are farms, large clearings and small settlements all throughout it. If one were to make a video of a typical drive through the forest and then play it on fast forward, the general pattern would go as such:

Forest-forest-clearing-forest-long straight road-field-forest-forest-town-forest-long straight road-clearing-forest-forest.

Thus the setting of this Christmas. Later, photos and maybe even the Christmas itself.