Journal entries:
•December 24, 2006•
A traditional Czech Christmas dinner includes a baked carp. Two men have set up a table on the corner of our busy street. They have big, beautiful live carp in water filled troughs and people line up to buy them. The men pull the fish out by the tail then smash them over the head with a heavy wooden mallet. It's horrible. On and on it goes. Thud, thud, thud. It makes me think of that old Beatles song, bang, bang Maxwell's silver hammer came down on their heads. Puts me right off fish.
Two blocks from our apartment is the Flora, a three story shopping mall, lavishly decorated and full of shoppers. Credit cards are a fairly new phenomenon here so now the Czechs can dig themselves into debt with the rest of us. It's a real sign of prosperity when people can buy what they can't afford.
•December 25, 2006•
Today we went to a cousin's house for a couple of hours. She made sandwiches and cookies and that was our Christmas dinner. It was just the three of us. Now I know how lonely the holidays are for people without family. One year in Oakland I decided not to make Thanksgiving dinner and we went to a restaurant instead. I remember feeling so sad to see people eating a restaurant turkey dinner alone. To me the holidays are about family together telling funny and touching stories about years passed and remembering loved ones who are gone.
So this was our Prague Christmas. Pretty dismal. But Christmas, like paying taxes, comes every year and there will be others.
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