Cultural: Polish Christmas ornaments
Tradition!
There is a long tradition of hand made Polish glass ornaments. There are many such small factories spread around Poland. People set up shop and sell these ornaments in various malls and of course, on line. Many are exported to the USA where they are sold for 3-5x the price we pay for them.
My kids and I ended up going to the mall the other day and I stopped and took a few pictures of some of the ornaments that were set up to sell.
Enjoy!
When you see numbers, these are Polish zlotys, not Euro - since Poland, while it is a member of the European Union, does not use the Euro, but still uses its own currency, the Polish zloty.
The ratio is about 3.5 zlotys to one USD. You can check at www.xe.com at any time to find the "real exchange rate" for that day.
Export
Some of the factories make ornaments for places like Macy's or other expensive stores in the USA. You can probably also find Polish glass ornaments on auction sites such as ebay if you are interested buying some. Shipping would scare me, though, as these are glass, and as such, quite breakable!
Live and in Person
Last year at this same mall, there was a man actually decorating some of these ornaments. Here are some shots from 2016.
I think the detail on these is incredible! If I see one of these again, I will buy it - I love it!
Closer.......
I'm partial to the ornaments that are special like this one. I also like the shaped ones. For a while I was buying one or two every year. But I've stopped that now since I have plenty of ornaments for our tree!
These ornaments are really all just beautiful. I have a friend who worked at one of these factories. The people who do this painting are real artists - really, very good! They don't make that much - well, they make it based on how much they do, but it isn't very much considering the talent that they have to have! She hardly made anything at all because she was slow at this work. Some of the detail is so intricate and each one of the ornaments will be slightly different, depending on the artist who is painting it.
And now you know a little bit more than you used to know about Polish hand painted ornaments.
That means "Happy Holiday" in Polish!
And don't forget - you can buy fabric for your special projects from my sister, Rachael, over a the store! She's ready and able to serve you with some great fabrics at fantastic prices!