Close your eyes for a moment and conjure up the most traditional Christmas scene you can imagine. Perhaps you see tall huddled houses, each with its rich icing of snow. Flickering lamps in windows providing a hearty glow. A picturesque old town square, with rosy-cheeked children bundled into winter clothes, hurling snowballs. Bespectacled old men and women tottering by, benevolent smiles on their lips. Skaters whizzing past and falling with gales of laughter to the ground. A perfectly-formed snowman, complete with carrot nose and eyes of coal. And above all, a sky of indigo with polished stars.
If these scenes correspond to your actual experience, count yourself lucky. I grew up, like all the children around me in Wales, with these scenes imprinted on my mind, but it never really occurred to me as a young boy to ask why I never saw anything like this in my own town. Sure, we got snow on rare occasions, but usually the salty sea air saw to that, before we could build up much of an armoury of snowballs. The round missiles I pelted towards my brother’s head would more often than not break up in mid-flight and flutter harmlessly to the ground. Meanwhile, our feeble attempts at snowmen often melted in a single weak-sunned afternoon. No, the place portrayed in the Christmas cards was another country.
It was only when I arrived in Prague as a teacher many years later that I suddenly realised what had happened. Our entire range of images, in fact the entire iconography of Christmas had been lifted wholesale from central Europe while no one was looking. Here at last were those very scenes I had gazed at throughout my childhood. To wander around this exquisite old city in December was to step into a magic Christmas card, to be transported to the neverland promised in all those colourful tableaux.
Christmas starts early in the Czech Republic. On St Barbara’s Day (December 4th), a cherry tree is taken inside the kitchen and put into water. The branch then bursts into bloom during the Christmas season. This is considered good luck. If the girl tending it is of age and not married and the branch blooms exactly on Christmas Eve, she will find a good man and marry him within a year. I’m not sure if my girlfriend at the time (who is now, I am happy to say, my wife) found a cherry tree. If she did, it must have been a slow-bloomer: she got me anyway, lucky girl, but not till many years later.
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