Christmas

Dear readers! I am sending you a photograph from my album taken in a kindergarten on New Year’s Eve ahead of 1968. Ahead of a New Year’s pageant, the bust of the leader of the proletarian revolution disappeared and was suddenly replaced by a Christmas tree. It had never happened before and none of us knew that the coming year would be different from the one that had come before it, or different from those that would come after. Suddenly we were a step away from normal civilized conditions not unlike those in Prague in the spring of 1968. The photo shows two boys with bowties (one of whom is the adult author of this letter). If we could have, we would have told children in Czechoslovakia to “teach us the rules, so that we could play together”. But the two other boys, holding the Snow Maiden’s hand would have puffed up their cheeks and gone and told on us to the teacher. By the way, one of the rabbit ear’s in the costume which my grandma sewed and starched was broken off by one of those boys even before the pageant had started. In the name of the two of us with the bowties, please allow me to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Dmitrij Krupenčik, Russia

   Back to the results