Vesele Vanoce

You know...when you're growing up you accept certain activities and traditions as "normal" because that's all you know. You assume that what you do to celebrate certain holidays is what everyone else is doing. It's not until you're older that you realize your family may have been a little weird.


Take for example a Czechoslovakian Christmas tradition we grew up with called "Vesele Vanoce." Actually...that's how you say, "Merry Christmas" in Slovak. That's kind of nice. But what I remember from being a kid is that my older male cousins would go to all the relatives' homes on Christmas morning to "Vinchovatz". That's a verb. I'm sure it is not spelled anything like that. I don't even know if it's a word -- in any language. But that's what I remember. The way I understood it (and I can't find anything in doing research to back this up), the tradition was that it was a sign of good luck in the year to come if a young man was the first person to cross your threshold on Christmas morning. So in order to assure such good luck, the boys in the Mehall family would go out early and make sure they were the first ones over the doorstep. They would be invited in, of course, and they would give the greeting, "Vesele Vanoce a st'asny' novy' rok!" I just this year found out that's what the words are. To my young ears, it sounded like, "Vacille Vanochy, ashta slivy novy doke". But that may be my skewed memory, or it could be close to the truth. Because...to make it worth their effort and to ward off the cold of a Christmas morning in Illinois...they were rewarded at each house with a shot of whiskey. So by 10:00 a.m. they were pretty much loaded. Maybe we were one of the later stops.

But I guess things could have been worse. In doing research into this memory from my youth, I found out some other Slovak traditions that we did NOT perpetuate. First, there was the traditional extensive house cleaning in early December. On second thought, maybe we did follow this. It was hard to tell...my mother was always cleaning! But I have NOT carried it forward, even if she did. I found out, though, that baking cookies and sharing certain favorites with family and friends was always done. My daughters and grandchildren and I are doing that! I also like to make hand-made ornaments, like I wrote about a while back. But where we use wood, foam, paint, markers, bling, etc....my ancestors would make theirs from walnut shells wrapped in colored paper or eggshells decorated to look like fish or angels. And speaking of fish -- I read that these folks would go out on December 23rd to buy the "traditional Christmas carp for dinner". It went on to say that several days earlier, huge wooden barrels appeared in the cities with live carp swimming around in them. The buyer would point to the fish they wanted and the fun of trying to catch it began. Usually, the fish would be taken home alive and allowed to swim in the family bathtub until Christmas eve morning. Right -- I'll be at Kroger's...and when I'm in the shower on Thursday night, you can bet there won't be a carp in there with me -- dead or alive!!