The Cupertino Courier

Sarnacka-Mahoney

Tale of a communist Christmas

By ELISA SARNACKA-MAHONEY

Communism was such a nasty thing: people hidden behind tired and listless faces; landscapes marred with ugly blocks of flats, factories and other state enterprises. In 1980, as a result of corrupt political administration, my country, Poland, entered a serious economic crisis which turned survival into a real challenge.

Winter 1982 was the hardest of all. Heavy snowfalls caused frequent road closures so that deliveries of food and supplies became even more scarce. I truly wonder how my mother managed to assemble all the ingredients she needed for the Christmas Eve dinner, and yet we had it all: fried carp, marinated herrings, cabbage with dried mushrooms, fruitcake, even walnuts and chocolate. Only one thing was going to be missing: presents. My parents "prepared" me for this. About two weeks before Christmas we had a talk, and I heard that in spite of trying for weeks, they had not been able to find anything worth buying. With the crisis, the communication failure and everybody out shopping for gifts, not a sock nor a toy nor even a bar of soap was left on the shop shelves.

A bright 12-year-old, I tried to stand up to the situation and to understand that such were the sacrifices one should accept in the name of "circumstances." But naturally, it upset me; it felt like I was being stripped of the most charming part of my childhood and that the best, trouble-free part of it was leaving me forever.

The dinner began in a prim if somehow dispirited atmosphere. I could not help glancing toward the Christmas tree, hoping that maybe a miracle would occur and I would see some small box wrapped in shiny paper. But time went on and nothing happened. At some point, when we were almost finished with the meal, Mom sent me to the kitchen to put on a kettle. I returned to the table, sat down and remembered that my tears were hanging on just beneath the lids, ready to burst forth at any time.

Resigned, I slowly reached for the fork half-hidden under my plate. And then I felt that something else was stuck in there, too. A metal, three-color pen in a red rubber sheath! A present!

I looked at my parents. Sudden wetness in their eyes could only have one meaning. It turned out that in the morning a neighbor popped in to borrow some flour. When she heard that Mom had not managed to get me any presents, she ran back to her apartment and came back with the three-color pen, one of the gifts she had intended to give to her own kids. That pen had cost her two hours of queuing in a stationery store.

Life's gotten better since those deprived years. The monstrous system collapsed, and the Polish economy improved. People learned how to forget that 10 years ago they could only buy one pair of new shoes per year, purchased with a special talon (allowance ticket). Free to travel, many of them, including myself, left the old country and made homes in other parts of the world, where people are subjects of a totally different regime --overdoing and overbuying.

I often look back on my "communist" childhood, wondering what kind of a person I would have become had I not been born and raised there. Of course, there are many things I hate communism for. But there also is one I treasure and I would never want to lose--the strength it gave me. Without that sad child inside on whom the whole world cheated 14 years ago, I could just as well be forgetting that Christmas is not about shopping and dashing around in frenzy, but about giving. Presents are but a symbolic gesture to show how much we love and care about each other.

Elisa Sarnacka-Mahoney is a resident of Sunnyvale.