Sales of luxury goods go up in Poland, will the Vietnamese panga upstage the traditional Polish carp on the Christmas Eve table? Also, Christmas cooking - the time of madness and pleasure.

Weeklies reviewed by Krystyna Kolosowska.

Newsweek Poland argues that different visions of foreign policy, pursued by the government and the President, do not necessarily cause harm to Poland. But Donald Tusk and Lech Kaczynski rarely take advantage of this situation. In fact, positive effects are mainly its side effects. The Polish Prime Minister and the President have played the part of a bad and a good policeman in contacts with foreign partners a number of times. For an outside observer this might have looked like a planned strategy. This is what happened in Brussels recently, where some participants in the summit had the impression that President Kaczynski is delaying the signing of the Lisbon Treaty to pave the way for PM Tusk to achieve success with the climate package. This strategy has succeeded. Poland won concessions worth 60 billion zlotys. Polish coal powered electric stations will not be closed for some years to come because of their high carbon dioxide emissions. The credit for the Brussels compromise goes mainly to the government. But it is important that the Polish delegation, which comprised both the PM and the President, spoke with one voice. This has not happened all too often during the year coming to a close, says Newsweek.

International criminal gangs stealing money from personal bank accounts have zeroed in on Poland, writes Gazeta Polska. Practically every week the police receive signals of such bank thefts. The money is cashed in Bulgaria, Spain and even Saudi Arabia with the use of cards scanned in Poland. Frauds, who copy our bank cards and capture PIN codes have become particularly active in the Christmas season. It is mainly thieves from Bulgaria and Romania, who specialize in skimming, as this kind of theft is called. Sadly, while the whole world is withdrawing from the use of magnetic cards, which are easy to forge, the majority of cash machines in Poland do not comply with the EMV standard, which ensures the inter-operation of smart, chip cards, says Gazeta Polska.

With the Christmas rush in its peak, Polityka writes that the sales of luxury goods have been rising fast in Poland, despite the looming global economic crisis. For about 85 percent of Poles, surveyed by the ARC Rynek i Opinia, the top symbol of luxury is a car worth over 80 thousand zlotys, or about 40 thousand euros. Next on the list is brand name jewellery and a summer house. For some 60 percent of those polled a symbol of luxury is being able to afford household service and for 54 percent – brand clothes. The thicker the wallet, the more distant luxury symbols are from the ideas of average earners. In communist Poland, that drab period of scarcity,  the humble toilet paper was counted among luxury goods. But for luxury business to grow, one needs more wealthy customers. If the crisis continues for a long time, the Polish society will not grow richer at the present pace and Poland’s small, upper middle class will not expand, Polityka warns.

The weekly Wprost reports that it took the panga, a fish produced in Vietnam, just a few years to become the third most popular fish among Polish consumers. It is even set to upstage the carp, until now a must in the Christmas Eve table of Poles. Poland is the second biggest market for Vietnamese exporters of panga. This year, over 40 thousand tons of this fish will appear in Polish shops - four times more than the traditional carp. Polish experts and producers are outraged. ‘To exchange the carp for the panga? It would be a tragedy. Our carp grows unperturbed for three years before it appears on the table. The panga is a purely industrial product.’ – says dr Andrzej Lirski from the Institute of Inland Fishing. In 2005 Polish carp producers even created a society for the promotion of fish and fish products. Now, using EU funds, they launched a campaign to convince Poles that the carp, and not the panga, deserves a prominent place on the Christmas table.

When describing their Christmas Eve dinner, Poles tend to speak of traditional twelve or thirteen dishes, which suggests a certain uniformity. But Tygodnik Powszechny points out that there actually does not exist a single menu, which we all share. Christmas, especially Christmas Eve, is one of the rare moments in our culinary life, when we reject uniformity, when we eat dishes which are a part of the family or regional tradition. We start cooking three days before Christmas – this is what many Poles say. It is the time of madness, plunging in the old cuisine, reaching for good tastes which, however, require considerable effort to prepare, soaking in water, frying, mincing and kneading. Well, Merry Christmas.