“Somehow it was, somehow it will be, it will turn out somehow,” she always said, calmly drinking the strongest coffee in the world from a mug she held by the ear with her little finger raised to the sky. My mom was kind of a sucker for Christmas and actually made fun of everything about it. Which in the end meant that as a child I was absolutely divine Christmas with a lot of presents, which I still don’t understand how he and dad managed to get them for so much money.
She could come up with incredibly crazy riddles around my desired gifts to keep me as tense as possible. “This gift, if it was disassembled and stretched, you could walk around our estate with it.” For example, this is how she described to me the desired magician with cassettes in which tapes were spinning. I confess that I never measured how long they were, and I did not walk around our housing estate with them.
I recently received a present from my mother for Christmas, even though she is no longer here.
Hanka, my dear friend from childhood, gave me the puzzle instead. “You know one of our Christmases years ago almost wouldn’t have happened if your mom hadn’t been the most generous?” she asked me.
I had to admit that I didn’t know, I didn’t guess. And so Hanka told me a memory of my mother that I had forgotten.
It happened under socialism when Advent time it resembled a hunt, it was necessary to loot and loot as quickly as possible before everything disappeared – wrapping paper, presents, decorations, trees, in short, everything. It was a struggle – and since not everyone could fight with full commitment, it could easily be that something was missing from the Christmas table.
That day, Hanka came to us crying, she was sixteen, and her parents gave her the task of going to a department store called Centrum, where carp were sold, and buy one there. They told her that she had to come in time because the carp were disappearing fast. But Hanka had a date, and when she arrived in front of the mall, the tub of carp was empty. She was desperate and went to our house to confide what she had done.
My mom didn’t have a date so she had fish.
“You’re not going to cry over something stupid like that,” she admonished Hank.
“But what shall we have for dinner?” objected a friend.
“Well, carp. We’ll split up with you.”
Mom went to the fridge and pulled out a carp. But it turned out that we didn’t even have all of them left, they said they had the last half, which looked more like a quarter. Hanka looked at us desperately.
“You won’t have anything left!”
“A bit, yes. And we also have potato salad.”
Mom uncompromisingly cut up our carp and handed it to her.
So I got this memory under the tree this year. Perhaps also to ask whether, in the affluence that surrounds us, we would be able to part with our neighbors for the last bit of gossip.
Merry Christmas my dears, be generous to yourself on Christmas Day and remember that it is not about abundance.
