I’ve always had a soft spot for Poland since teaching high school history. And although I have never visited – it’s been on my wish list of destinations for a long time. It was definitely one to think hard about and what I found was really very cool!
Breakfast
We ate apple pancakes for breakfast as they seemed to be something that was very Polish. Penny still talks about them being one of her favourite breakfasts ever. I’ll admit that time wasn’t on my side and so I used shop bought crepes and apple pie filling from a can. You can also find some really awesome recipes online if you have more time or want a really authentic taste.
Marzanna
I wanted to do something that was uniquely Polish and I found a couple of cool ideas. One was that in Poland they celebrate your ‘name’ day rather than your birthday and so you have a party on your Saints day. I thought this was a brilliant idea but none of us had the right names on the right days and so I needed to discover something more timely. To my delight there is a brilliant Polish custom to welcome the spring which dates back to when Poland had a Pagan religion many moons ago. Marzanna was a winter witch and so to welcome the first day of spring in some parts of Poland, children make an effigy of her out of straw. They then burn the doll on the first day of spring and throw her into the River to welcome the Spring. The adventure of this appealed to me greatly and so we duly made a (small) Marzanna doll.
We were a couple of weeks early for the first day of Spring but we had the perfect weather, so we went to the River Alt which is a few minutes down the road from us. I had explained the whole thing carefully to Penny but when we threw the doll into the river she was filled with devastation. ‘Bye bye Dolly’ shouted Freddie gleefully as Penny wept. Still, I think you will agree its been an amazingly hot Spring by UK standards and so you are all very welcome!!
Polish food
The nearest town to us has a Polish shop so Mark and Penny went to buy us a feast to eat later when granny was coming over. I had tried to find a Polish restaurant but in the event cooking our own Polish food was really fun. Penny loved the chocolates and I thought the bread was extra nice. there are Polish shops in most towns and cities so it’s definitely worth tracking yours down.
Polish words
I do like to learn a little on our pretend journeys and so we bought a book of a thousand Polish words what struck us wasn’t how many of them were different to English words, but actually how many of them were the same! Penny and Freddie chose words and wrote them out and drew the pictures underneath. I always feel this is quite empowering rather than stipulating the words they need to learn.
Polish Graves
While Penny and Mark were buying Polish food, Freddie and I went on a special trip. I had discovered that the RAF airbase near us had had some Polish Pilots based there in WW2. I had known that when the Nazi’s invaded a number of Polish pilots had flown to Britain and then had fought with the RAF. I discovered that as the closest Catholic church to the airbase, our local church had the bodies of some Polish pilots buried there and so Freddie and I took them some daffodils from our garden. Of the whole weekend this was for me definitely the most special and memorable part and I will make sure that I visit the graves again on the 11th November.
Watching TV
We are big fans of https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b09r7th9/my-world-kitchen and so we found the episode that looks at Polish food and watched it. The show is great for kids as it gives you a little bit of Geography and History about the country as well as showing children cooking and eating the food. This would be a great watch for any pretend world travel and I think they have covered a very wide range of countries.
Family
One of the things I noticed was how family orientated Poland is and so it made sense to invite granny over to share in our Polish feast. Much joy was had trying all the many foods that Mark and Penny had bought from the Polish shop and we even had Polish wine to drink which tasted like flowers.
Pretend Poland turned out to be an unexpected emotional experience! The war graves and the welcoming of the Spring seemed to force me to reflect both forwards and backwards in a way none of our other pretend visits have done. It seems timely, with retrospect, that we had a weekend to reflect on sacrifice and on our own lives before we found ourselves in this unprecedented pandemic. I think that honestly – nothing and nowhere could have prepared us better for what was to come.
