Velikonoční Pondělí

Let's say you're a girl living in, I don't know, Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. You are maybe 11. On the Monday after Easter (which, of course, is a holiday), you awaken to incessant knocking on your front door. Mother and father are somewhere in the back of the house (father smoking sausage, mother making soup), and you hasten to the doorway to find many of your male friends poised with long poles of intertwined vines with rainbow-coloured tissue paper hanging from the tip like an ancient whip (they are actually called pomlavsky). They cry some rhyme that essentially means "give us one of the eggs you have painted for easter or we are going to beat you." The girl at this point has one of two options. If she was prepared for this occasion (which, judging by the fact that this day has been celebrated in such a fashion since the fifteenth century, she would be), she will grab her handy pail of water and douse the boys while they stand dumbfounded. She eventually gives them the egg, just because she feels sorry for them and it is Easter and yada yada Christ rose, and they go away.

And that's what happens on Easter Monday in the Czech Republic. What a sad day not to be in Prague!