Czech Christmas Traditions

“Walnuts roasting in every available space…”

Veselé Vánoce! Merry Christmas (and happy holidays/enjoy the snow and noise? to non-Christmas celebrators)! Depending on when you read this, and depending on who you are, it ’tis the season for Christmas! And for me, as someone who does celebrate Christmas (typically in a more secular way than a religious one, admittedly) that means lots of things! Like Christmas trees full of lights and presents and a pickle on a string, or snow on the ground and lights strung up across the entire house. Or traditions ranging from baking cookies with family and singing Christmas carols together to drunkenly cleaning someone else’s vomit from the bathroom floor on New Year’s even for the third(?) year in a row. That’s, uh, a tradition I’d like to die off, please.

But while there are plenty of Christmas traditions that I personally celebrate (letter-themed white elephant Christmas gifts such as the letter H standing for John Wayne-themed glass mugs, huge family get-togethers where someone always brings a delightful corn casserole and a ham that may or may be scavenged by dogs later in the evening, a Christmas Eve lunch with an unseasonable amount of steak, et cetera et cetera), this season has been a little bit different for me, for two large reasons. One, I’m in Minnesota still, hundreds of miles away from 90% of my family and friends. Two, I’ve been teaching about the Christmas traditions of various 19th century European immigrant groups as a part of my job. My mind is full to the brim with other people’s Christmas traditions. And you know what? I think it’s about time I take them for myself.

Not in like a Grinch-y way, of course. I’m not going to be stealing anyone’s Christmas, although I have noticed that I don’t feel particularly festive for any holidays recently. Halloween didn’t even hit the same this year. I’m just not much interested in celebrating lately, which I find terribly sad! I love holidays, especially Halloween and Christmas, and the fact that I can’t seem to find the same enjoyment out of them is kind of heartbreaking. Maybe this is because I’m so far from home and don’t do much to celebrate on my own (though Cheyenne and I did put our own Christmas tree up)? Or because I’m so busy and stressed with other things it’s hard to find time for someone else? Or because my usual holiday traditions have broken down as a combination of getting older, moving away, and COVID, and I’m feeling a distinct disconnect from both friends, family, and my own personal history? Maybe some combination of all of the above? I don’t know, perhaps this is what all people go through with holidays after growing up but before having children and their wide-eyed wonder at holiday celebrations. Maybe I just need kids. Editor’s note: I am not stealing children for the purpose of consuming their joy and I definitely do not have bottles of distilled childhood whimsy at the back of my cabinet to be sold to goblins. I repeat, I am not stealing children. I am not, nor do I have any relation to, anyone named Jareth.

But I’m going to attempt to rebuild some of my love for the holidays, the kind of love that you find at the end of so many Christmas movies about some middle-aged and overworked fart waking up to realize his life has passed him by and he’s stuck in an unhappy job and a loveless marriage and playing father to a child he doesn’t know. Man, a lot of Christmas movies are kind of terrifyingly existential if you dig any deeper than the surface. Luckily my “once-in-a-lifetime” moment hasn’t happened yet, and David Byrne willing, hopefully never will happen, so I suppose there’s still hope for me out there. And as a step towards preventing that from happening, I’m going to try and adopt some new Christmas traditions from the old European ones I’ve spend the last two months studying and teaching.

Specifically, the Czech ones! Mainly because I’m (at least a little) Czech! Sure, I’m also British and German (and Dutch and, like, some other stuff), but modern American Christmas is already so much of British and German tradition. Christmas trees? German thing. Christmas lights? German thing. Presents under the tree? British thing. Christmas Carols? British thing. Christmas carols that demand an offering of figgy pudding in return for the carolers abstaining from violence? Rowdy, pre-Victorian British that got whitewashed by the bourgeoisie. Hell, between Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens, the Brits practically invented American Christmas themselves. We Americans just threw in things like ugly sweater parties, absurdly unethical consumption, and Black Friday for good measure. Yay?

But the fun thing about Czech Christmas traditions is that modern American Christmas didn’t borrow much from the Czech. So Czech Christmas traditions kind of come across as weird and unusual compared to the very family-friendly, no-nonsense, practically-puritan Christmas that was/is so popular in the American canon. Like, did you know that Czech Christmas tradition has a lot of fortune-telling in it? And a bunch of walnuts? Like, walnuts fucking everywhere. Every fucking thing has walnuts involved. It is too many walnuts. And I can’t figure out why. No one seems to have any good idea as to why walnuts compared to any other kind of nut. Fuck you, walnuts are your Christmas food now.

This all being said, we oughta introduce some cultural relativity to things. If I refer to a tradition as “weird” or “unusual” or “has too many walnuts,” I do so out of love and appreciation, not to criticize or degrade. Give me the benefit of the doubt here. Also, these are traditions that were common in the late 1800’s and practiced by Czech immigrants to the United States. The Czech Republic/Bohemia/Czechoslovakia has changed a lot since then (like, rise and fall of the Soviet Union and a bloodless revolution levels of change), and I have never been to the Czech Republic, so there is the distinct possibility that you could show this whole blog to Czech folks and they’ll have no idea what I’m talking about. They’ll probably also ask you to stay away from their children, but that’s neither here nor there.

But tradition! Tradition. The most recognizable Czech Christmas tradition is probably Saint Nicholas Day, or as he’s called in Czech/Slovak, Svatý Mikuláš. Yes, I did copy that spelling directly from a different website. Sure, lots of European/Christian countries celebrate Saint Nicholas day as a major feast day during Advent, but it’s a bigger deal in Central and Eastern Europe, from what I understand. It’s a day that sees children putting out boots or stockings to receive a gift from the good St. Nicholas, who descends from Heaven on a golden rope to deliver goodies of fruit, hard candies, and walnuts, while the evil anti-Nicholas, Cert (the more Czech-specific version of Krampus), climbs his way up from Hell bearing chains and a child-snatching bag. Old-school European tradition has always got that extra little bit of, ah, spice to it.

When I was a kid (right up into and including this year, actually), my grandmother would always fill my St. Nicholas stocking with an orange, an apple, assorted nuts (always including at least one walnut), a coloring book, crayons, and usually socks and other small gifts, along with my personal favorite, an iced gingerbread cookie with a sticker of St. Nicholas (RIP Busy Bee Bakery). As a kid, I did not appreciate the fruit or nuts. I didn’t get it. But now, looking at the historical origins, I appreciate the connection to our Czech heritage and the European immigration story. Especially because when the Czech side of my family first got here, the late 1800’s, that’s when the railroads started refrigerating their cars and shipping things like oranges up from Florida and California into the Midwest without them spoiling. So the fruit and the walnuts are based in tradition! Not just random stuff my grandma stuck in a sock.

But, as far as I know, that’s where the Czech traditions my family still celebrates end. Unless my grandma’s got some more walnuts up her sleeve, anyway. I know my cousins and my grandma make kolache (or perhaps more accurately kolacky? Kolaczki? Kolatche? Kloaca?), which are those Czech cookies stuffed with cream cheese, poppyseed, and apricot (or apple if you’re an American heathen). But I’m not much of a baker myself, and my mom typically makes more German or American cookies, and my dad makes Swedish cookies despite none of us being Swedish. So maybe I can pick up instead where the Czechs left off. Where they always leave off. Walnuts.

Besides walnuts making their way into stockings, breads, pastries, and various other Czech Christmas foods, gold foil or painted walnuts were commonly put up on Christmas trees in Czech-American houses. And a bowl of walnuts might have been left out as decoration or for Santa and his elves (the elves, of course, being a derivative of the Swedish Tomte and Norwegian Julenisse). But you can also tell your own fortune with boats made out of walnut shells. Because you got to do something with all the fucking shells after you eat the damn things. The trick is to melt some candle wax into a half a walnut shell, stick a candle in there, light up, and float it in a pan of water during Christmas dinner. Everyone gets one boat, and whatever happens to your nutboat and the surrounding fleet of nutboats will tell you what’s gonna happen to you in the coming year.

So, for example, if your boat sinks and your candle goes out, might be a rocky year ahead. If your boat sticks together with all the other boats, then you can expect to be with family in the new year. If your boat grows legs and walks off, then you might have bigger problems to attend to. But there are other ways to predict the future or influence fortune, too! You might tie the legs of your table together to prevent it from running away (literally; prevent it from being stolen). You might cut an apple in half to see what shape the seeds make, for health or ill fortune. You could drip some hot lead or hot wax in a pot of water and divine meaning from the shapes. Like reading tea leaves, but for the non-British. You might toss a shoe over your shoulder and which way the toe points will tell you either which way you’ll travel in the coming year, or which way your future love will come from. You can also see the face of your future love by staring in a mirror for long enough. I mean, you probably have to stare for pretty long to see someone else’s face in the mirror though. Also, women can draw sticks from the kindling bundle, and if they draw a long stick, their husband will be tall, and if they draw a short stick, their husband will be short. I feel like there’s something else going on there, too, but I can’t quite put my stick on it…

There’s also a handful of superstitions/fortune-telling things that might have a practical effect! For example, burying Christmas dinner leftovers underneath fruit trees or in fields is considered a good luck practice to ensure a good harvest. That’s just fertilizing! Or you might bake special breads or make special dishes to feed to your livestock and make sure no one goes hungry; seems like a great way to keep their vitamins up during the long, dark nights of winter. Of course, there’s also stuff that just ties into other parts of the evening, too. Like, you’re supposed to keep a scale from the Christmas dinner carp in your wallet for good luck. Because carp are symbols of wealth and good fortune, apparently?

That’s one part of the Czech Christmas tradition that maybe I won’t re-introduce to my family; the Christmas carp. Starting around the 1700 and 1800’s, European carp became a popular source of protein for Christmas dinner (or, more likely, Christmas Eve dinner, since Christmas Eve is supposed to be a fast day for Catholics, and fish aren’t considered “meat.”). One of the more popular ways of cooking the fish, besides just cutting it up and making a soup out of it, is to crust it with crushed gingerbread cookies. It’s called, apparently, carp on the black, I guess? There’s like a billion different variations on it. But it also sometimes includes walnuts. Because why the hell not at this point. Oh, you can also include honey and garlic as part of Christmas dinner. Namely because garlic is supposed to keep the evil spirits away, you might as well leave a bulb on your table.

I read a particularly fun story about the carp where some families would buy the Christmas carp a week ahead of time, and then keep it in their bathtub as a sort of Christmas pet. I think I’m going to start doing that, now. I’ll keep whatever’s going to become my Christmas dinner as a pet before eating it. Christmas ham? Warm up the garage, we’ve got a pig on the way. Christmas goose? Better get used to honking. Christmas tofurkey? Get that sausage grinder going, we’ve got a lot of vegans to grind up to get that much tofu. You can only get the tofu from their liver, you know.

There are other traditions that I haven’t mentioned here, of course. Christmas is a time to make amends and offer forgiveness. Maybe you want to decorate your Christmas tree with more than just walnuts. In that case, you can paint eggs! Painted eggs are quite popular on Czech trees (and Ukraining and Russian, too, if I’m not mistaken). Why eggs? I suspect it has to do with the winter solstice and the fact that, not long after Christmas, the days begin to get longer again. The dark of the night is receding. It’s like the day is being born anew, and eggs are new life. So I guess that’s it, maybe? I mean, so much of European Christian tradition is informed by pre-Christian pagan practices, too, which are informed by the natural cycle of light and dark in the year, so it kind of makes sense. If you keep the fast for all of Christmas Eve, at the end of the day, either before or after midnight mass, you might see a vision of the golden piglet, showering you in good fortune and golden bacon in the coming year. Because not eating for an entire day does tend to cause hallucinations, I suppose. If the entire family humbles themselves like the birth of Jesus and sleeps together on the hay/straw under the Christmas tree, good luck will be yours. No one can stand up from the Christmas dinner table until everyone has finished eating, and tables have to be set for even numbers. No one leaves until you eat that sauerkraut, damn it! This is a hostage situation.

There are more, too, I’m sure. Some that I don’t even know about, or ones that are practiced in the modern day because of/in spite of the Soviet Union squashing religious practice for fifty-plus years. I mean, I didn’t even mention one of the world’s largest nativity scenes in in the Czech republic, so that’s got to count for something (though maybe that’s more Moravian than Czech?).

But this is where my knowledge of Czech tradition comes to an end. I mean, there are some big differences to American Christmas, sure. Eggs on the tree, Saint Nicholas having a hefty place in the Christmas celebration, carp for dinner, kolache for desserts, fortune-telling, walnut boats, walnuts with dinner, walnuts on the tree, walnuts in the stockings, walnuts walnuts walnuts fucking everywhere. But there’s more to it than just a list of cultural differences. There’s the cultural context that these traditions grew up in, the other seasonal traditions of the Czech people, the cultural intermingling that took place in immigrant America, and the ways that things change to fit into our lives today. There’s a whole story here that just talking about singular traditions as if they were in a bubble, just doesn’t quite explain. And I, for the most part, do not have access to that larger story. I have access to the story of my own Christmas traditions, and where they come from and where they go, and I can talk about the larger narrative of immigrant tradition in America, but it’s part of a larger story still.

So maybe, if I really want to reinvigorate that love of the holidays that seems to be draining out of some wound in my soul, maybe I can prop it up a bit with new traditions that get me close to something like a “culture” or a “heritage” or a “fuckton of walnuts.” I don’t think I’ll be cooking carp for Christmas, but I think I could float some walnut boats with my family and play some fortune-telling games. Down the line, I can make sure my kids get gifts from St. Nicholas and are abducted by Cert and understand the value of the orange. I do have a handful of solid traditions of my own, but I think there’s always room for a few more, especially ones that were maybe forgotten over time, or ones that my family might have practiced a hundred years ago. Who knows, maybe one day my great-grandchildren will be floating walnut boats of their own when someone rediscovers the great American Christmas tradition of playing football with a fruitcake, and everything comes full circle. It’s all fun and games until someone chips a tooth.

But until then, Merry Christmas! And Happy New Year! And if you don’t celebrate either of those, that’s ok. I’ve got a walnut just for you.