Happy Fucking Easter!

It seems that holidays are always getting hijacked. The Romans rolled over the Greek gods and holidays and the early Christians added another layer when threw Jesus into the mix. In the former eastern bloc countries, the Communists (or primarily the Russians, I guess) made former religious holidays a bit more worker orientated or allowed them to revert back to their pre-Christian form. An interesting cycle to observe; one that I admittedly know little about, save for my couple years spent living in a small Czech town. I recently resolved to start writing down my stories and have cobbled together a collection of boozy memories, poorly punctuated and misspelled emails and overly analytical journal entries to try and make a more concrete memory of the years I spent as an English teacher in Jičín. Holidays are an easy point of difference and a simple conduit of engaging with the new environment. And the Czech version of Easter blew my mind. Even though most of my students rolled their eyes and called labeled the holiday “old-fashioned” and “stupid,” people still follow the traditions. And I’d never seen Easter quite like this before.

First of all, Easter is celebrated on Monday. In a country where nearly 80% of the populace claims to be atheist, Sunday is only a day of inconvenience when nearly everything – except the pubs - is closed. Easter Monday is the big day and the party, like most things in the Czech Republic (thanks to the Habsburg hangover), starts very early. Men braid willow branches to form a long elegant-looking stick called pomlázka, which is a fancy sounding foreign word for something that is really painful. That’s because the purpose of the pomlázka is to beat the crap out of females to help increase their “fertility.” (A lot of Czech holidays seemed to be concerned with baby-making – but more on those later.) Men would go from house to house, whipping girls’ ankles and legs and the women would reward the men with decorated eggs and shots of vodka or slivovice. The eggs didn’t get a lot attention but the alcohol did and the holiday continued so that by noon most of the men were effectively plastered and that’s when the women would get revenge by throwing water on them. Then everyone sat down to a big dinner to sober up and be ready to work on Tuesday.

My first Easter in the Czech Republic resulted in my vocabulary expanding to such phrases that translated as “my ass hurts” and “Easter hurts me.” The following Tuesday in one of my English classes I hoped to use the holiday as a lesson to get students to do something other than ask me to translate Gwen Stefani lyrics. So I called on Vladimir, a nineteen year old who had issues with high school and English, to tell me about his weekend. As with most student exchanges, it started out with some deep though-processing:

“I…I… at weekend…”

At this point he called for a dictionary, flipped through a couple of pages, found his word and then showed it for his desk mate for approval. She shrugged her shoulders as if to say “go for it,” and Vladimir’s lip started to curve upwards. He started again:

“At weekend, I good holiday. I fuck grandmother. Then make fucking on sister, mother and girlfriend. Very good holiday.”

Satisfied, he folded his arms and sat back in his chair. Midway through the fucking of his family, I pulled a move that would be a signature of my teaching; I moved the textbook over my mouth to try and hide my laughing. Laughing undermined my authority and as a twenty-two year old American in a classroom full of delinquent eighteen and nineteen year old boys, I needed all the courage I could muster. But there was no mistake. I demanded to see the dictionary and the verb about poking or something also translated as “to fuck.” So there you go. Be careful about where and what you get poked with on Easter Monday or you will end up immaculately conceiving. The new millennia could use another holiday to change things up.