Christmas in Brno

Elder Shirley and Elder Carlson with their new Christmas hats

Christmas presents under the little Christmas tree

Making clay nativity pieces on Christmas Eve at a member's house

Brno district

December 27, 2016

Hi Everyone!

It was good to hear and see you guys on the Skype call!

I'll just share with you a few Czech traditions that I experienced this last week. On Monday, we went to a member’s house and he had bought 2 carp and they were alive in the bathtub. Czechs eat carp on Christmas and the carp are sold on street corners all over the city. They are in big tubs and you can go up and buy one alive, or they can kill it for you on the spot. The member had it alive so that we could see him kill one. Then the other one was killed by my comp, Elder Carlson. We decorated their Christmas tree with them as well.

We made a ton of visits from the 23-26th. We went with the Sisters and stopped by as many members’ houses as we could. We sang a Czech Christmas carol for them (Narodil se Kristus Pan) and shared a verse from the Book of Mormon. We ended up finding a few less active members that we are planning to work with in the future. It was a lot of traveling and a lot of short visits, but it was great! Oh and with every visit that we made, people gave us these Czech Christmas cookies. They are called cukrovi and they are super good. But after eating some at every house you visit, it gets pretty hard to keeping eating at the 5th or 6th visit. 

Here in the Czech Republic, the main holiday is the 24th. We got invited to a member's house for dinner that night and ate the traditional Christmas meal with them, fried carp with potato salad. It was pretty good! Czech potato salad is hard to beat. We also did the apple cutting tradition where you cut an apple in half and if you see a star in the center it is a sign of good luck, but if you see a cross in the center it is a sign of sickness or death. We read from the Bible, the Christmas story with their family as well and acted out the story. It made for an awesome Czech Christmas experience.

Hope you all had a great Christmas experience as well! I know that Jesus Christ was born of Mary and that he is our Savior.

Love you all!

-Elder Shirley