Today, April 30th, is Čarodějnice (I hope I’m spelling that right – my wife is at work, Sam is at football practice and Isabel can’t read yet, so she’s not much help). Čarodějnice is a really cool holiday. It’s all about burning witches.
Burn, Baby Yagy, Burn!
Of course, if one wanted to be all radical feminist, one could make an argument against it. Witches, of course, are women. Historically (i.e. back in the day when they really did burn witches) the women who were burned as witches were the strange old women who lived alone in a shack out in the forest somewhere. That is, they were spinsters.
Also, there’s a reason they are drawn with scraggly hair, nasty teeth and a big nose wart. In those days before plastic surgery, before even the basics of modern day make-up and hair care had been invented, lots of people looked like that. Those that did, and were women, wound up living alone in a shack out in the forest somewhere. Until somebody decided to call them a witch, and have them burnt.
As unfair and imbalanced as our society is today, it’s been worse.
Anyway, it is a fun holiday. Some people dress up like witches. (boys can be ogres, demons or anything like that – it’s not Halloween, you have to stay with the theme) There are bonfires. Some people have them in their back yards. There are plenty of others in public parks. It is a way to welcome spring, burn away the problems, anxieties and fears of the year gone by. I remember one year we all wrote something down on a piece of paper, one thing from the year gone by we’d like to do without, and threw it into the fire. It didn’t really do anything but it DID feel good.
We usually go to the big, family friendly bonfire on Kampa Island, where they’ll burn a nice, larger than life size facsimile of a witch. There are smaller fires around the park. You can bring your own hot dogs and marshmallows for roasting, but there are plenty of snack stands as well.
And, as night falls, the flames become more sharply contrasted with the sky and are reflected in the river and in all the buildings across the river, and on all the bridges, the lights come on (just like they do every night) and it’s just one of those unbelievably spectacular, incredibly romantic Prague scenes.
It’s not really about the witches. It’s about the fire.
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It was a real nice night. A lot of kids from Sam’s school were there, there were plenty of scary witches, and a good time was had by all. Not enough cooking fires, though. You had to elbow into a crowd to get your weenie roasted.