There is an organic community besides the nation.There is more to civil society than formalised interest groups.Belonging matters and it is forged by people themselves.These seemingly straightforward, yet often overlooked, observations about the nature of contemporary society are the main takeaways from Helena Chielewska-Szlajfer's captivating book Ordinary Celebrations: Reshaping Poland's Community After Communism, in which she analyses Poland's changing social imaginary resulting from everyday practices.Chmielewska-Szlajfer masterfully investigates commonplace popular ‛celebrations' that construct new interpretations of Poland's history and have been giving meaning to people's social existence since 1989.Ordinary Celebrations is a dextrous investigation of popular religious rituals, of secular community-building events, and of initiatives challenging the monopoly of the state, which reveals a ‛society in the process of signifi cant transformation in the ways it images itself' (p.181).Chmielewska-Szlajfer describes and brings a closer understanding of that apparently obvious, yet uncanny, process, which took off under conditions of liberal democracy, by focusing on the overlooked dimensions of civic life.Her research, completed before 2014, is a highly prophetic piece of scholarship with regard to the route Poland has taken since 2015.Yet, at the same time, it offers hope for a way out of the current democratic backsliding through the power of civil society.In Ordinary Celebrations, Chmielewska-Szlajfer analyses the new, and increasingly popular, yet mundane cultural practices enabled by Poland's systemic change to democracy, and hence pluralism of the public sphere, which has long been the object of her study (Chmielewska-Szlajfer 2010).These are practices people engage in ARTYKUŁY RECENZYJNE, RECENZJE, OMÓWIENIA