Christmas

Note: this post is entirely translated from Czech by translate.google.com … can you understand it?

Christmas is – or should be – a time of meditation, meeting family and friends, reconciling. We see it in movies, it is written in magazines, mostly we have Christmas memories from childhood…

My memories of Christmas in childhood are positive. We lived in the center of Prague, but on Christmas holidays we went to the Giant Mountains for a cottage where my dad worked. We left 25.12. Early in the morning, we often carried luggage to the bus on sledges, even in Prague there was snow. I still do not understand how my mother managed to clean up and wrap up after Christmas Eve dinner… in my memories we always returned to a tidy apartment.

Perhaps we did not need what young families needed today… many “life-simplifying devices” did not exist, so we did not have to deal with them, we sewed clothes, in socialist Czechoslovakia we all basically lived as “socks”… or it seemed like that . The only choice in the shops was of the “is-not” type, and mandarins and oranges had to become queues, who could not stand the grandparents queue, often did not have fruit for children even at Christmas.

Is it nostalgia? Definitely not! I do not miss the wires one encountered whenever you wanted to see how our western neighbors lived… and if the Western capitalists were really as bad as they were in every newspaper. It was during the reign of one party and the media was censored… often auto-censored, so it was the same in all.

Pay the pan that the “Iron Curtain” has fallen and that since then we can enjoy democratic freedoms – freedom of expression and assembly. Pay the fuck that we can verify how we live on the other side of the border and we don’t have to invent unrealistic tales. Everywhere in the world, people have the same basic needs – eating, sleeping, having a roof over their heads, and having someone to talk to.

It is only a pity that we can not often agree … but that’s why Christmas is to think, stop, accept our own mistakes and forgive others … even at school we wrote on the blackboard before Christmas “Christmas is a holiday of peace, do not try our class” Jo… yeah, for the generation of my children it is prehistoric, just as for me prehistoric was the Second World War, which my parents lived and survived and I could not ask them about their experience anymore.

Have a nice Christmas!