Preparing for Christmas

“Wow, Mom! How did you do it!” I cried, full of genuine admiration and respect. “Years of diligence and sacrifice, my dear,” she answered with a sly smile. As usual.

There is no Santa or Father Christmas in Czech tradition; presents under the Christmas tree are brought by Jesus himself—Little Baby Jesus, to be precise. That posed a huge problem for communist narratives in what was supposedly a completely atheist society. They tried to replace Jesus with the Soviet “Grandfather Frost” in the fifties, but they failed completely. When the communists found that the only solution to the “Little Baby Jesus problem” was to cancel Christmas altogether, they gave up. Jesus stayed in Czech homes.

“Have you ever seen Little Baby Jesus bringing presents under the tree?” I asked my brother David—who is eight years my senior—once before the holidays. “Even though he can probably do everything, I’m not sure that the newborn baby is strong enough!” “Well, I haven’t seen him yet, and I think it’s not wise to spy on him. If you startled him, he could escape and leave you nothing!” he winked. That was actually a good point! I closed the case with the conclusion that since nobody had seen Little Jesus, I could imagine him however I wanted. I kept the idea of a six-year-old child in a hooded cloak with a sleigh to carry the huge pile of presents.

That kind of reliance on miracles was smart enough for kindergarten children, but it couldn’t help adults who wanted presents for their families. The planned economy suffered from a periodic scarcity of everything, so Christmas presents needed to be hunted down like any other goods. It was usual that children didn’t get what they wished for, but what they needed: new socks or tights, for example. My mother’s “Christmas-seeker” method was to stop in every shop randomly throughout the autumn and see if they had something useful there—and buy it, whatever it was. But the side problem was that she usually had me with her…

“It’s terrible,” my brother hissed while standing by his drawer one grey November morning. “I have literally no useful underwear! We have sports at school today. I have to change at the gym, and my schoolmates will ridicule me!” “You’re exaggerating, I’m sure,” I commented haughtily. “Why don’t you take that nice underwear Mother bought you last week?” I smiled nicely. “What? Mother bought me underwear last week and she hasn’t given it to me yet?” he groaned and ran to our mother. She released the intended present from her closet and immediately informed me that there is no Little Baby Jesus; parents give the presents under the Christmas tree. Better than putting the rest of her boxes in danger of discovery, she must have thought. “Years of diligence and sacrifice,” she closed the heated discussion with a moan.

Looking forward to Christmas with this new information about presents and their presence took on a new dimension. My brother, feeling guilty about my lost innocence, helped me with better time-orientation. Because I could count days only on my fingers, being in nursery school, he made me a simple calendar using a few sheets of paper pinned to the cabinet. It showed how many days there were until Christmas. Every morning I tore off one sheet, and a new number appeared. The last sheet I made myself—a beautiful sparkling Christmas tree with a yellow Star of David on the top. My brother David deserved that honour for sure. As I got older, I made the calendar myself; I remember one year at primary school, I started with the number ninety-seven.

Finally, I tore off the last sheet of my calendar and Christmas Eve was there! Actually, a new task for my brother. He had to kill the carp floating in the bathtub and prepare it for cooking. There was a strange custom in my country: the traditional food for Christmas evening is carp, usually fried, served with potato salad. The poor fish were sold from large vats in front of stores directly by fishermen and kept alive in the bathroom, probably to be fresh enough for a holiday meal in times when fridges were not common in households. But habits usually live much longer than their real justification. In my child’s opinion, the only nice point of this situation was that nobody could take a shower during the carp’s bath-occupancy.

My brother knew he was expected to be a hard man and a soldier in the future, so he was able to kill the fish at the age of twelve. “Are you not ashamed to worry about killing a fish? A future soldier?” my mother pushed him. “Okay, but in the army, I won’t be killing fish… I will be opening cans there,” he replied, using a line from an old Czechoslovak movie which my mother didn’t know. We recognized it in her wide-open eyes. Sarcasm was our home, and it was she who had taught us.

When the murder was completed, I liked to sit and watch how my brother processed the fish. He finally gave me the fish bladder and explained its function. He liked biology pretty much. “The human soul must look like that,” I decided, holding an almost intangible part of the body. And in the back of my mind, a chorus sang Good King Wenceslas, the joyful English song telling a story about the famous Czech saint of the 10th century.