Global chains pile the Christmas tat high – but I found joy in a tiny Scottish farm shop | Kapka Kassabova

Bulgarian workers far from home make Europe's wreaths and jumpers. What if we chose another way to celebrate?

The wreath is made from real pine branches. It is attractive and cheap. I can smell the pine. But the label confirms what I already know: made in Germany and shipped across the sea then loaded on to lorries along recently expanded motorways, to this supermarket in Scotland. And it so happens that I know the people who made this and the million other wreaths that sit in the warehouses of Europe's supermarket chains. They are unskilled" workers from the mountains of southern Bulgaria. I can hear their voices, humorous and philosophical. They know it's absurd, and many of them are Muslims, too.

You plant the saplings and next season you cut the branches and make Christmas wreaths for the Germans."

Kapka Kassabova is a Bulgarian writer based in Scotland. She is the author of Elixir and Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe