An Apple a Day
While this idiom is as familiar to Americans as sliced bread, there may not be as much familiarity with the many Czech superstitions on Christmas in connection with the apple. If we were to transliterate our idiom to Czech, they might say something like, “An apple at Christmas will seal your fate.”
After the Christmas meal, apples are disbursed to all and cut in half to reveal your future delight or demise. Czechs believe if the seeds of your apple are in a star it denotes health and happiness for the coming new year. However, if your seeds reveal the shape of a cross you are facing death in the coming year. Having never observed this practice in real time I am not sure how the conversations go proceeding such a revelation, but one can’t help but wonder how such an awkward revelation is handled by the host and received by the soon to die guest.
In addition to their predictive practices, single Czech females can be caught flinging apple peels over the head and the shape of the peel is believed to predict the letter of their future spouses name. For all the goat farmers out there… giving a goat an apple on Christmas Eve is the surefire way to guarantee plentiful and sweet milk for the year ahead.
The cutting of the apple is one of the most popular practices for Czechs at Christmas, and like so many of these traditions, dates back centuries, and perhaps as far back as the druidic Celts. You may have noticed a theme by now in these traditions; the constant urge to be able to somehow predict or influence the future. Maybe this desire started with Lucifer being thrown from heaven and his subsequent escapade in the garden. There is a recurring theme in our quest for the creatures to know what the Creator knows, and to somehow lay claim to a piece of the omniscience and omnipotence of God. While we Americans may not cut apples in order to divine our futures, we’ve managed to go a step further and incorporate it into Christian doctrine and then export it all over the world. Whether through the “Prayer of Jabez” or the toxic theology of TBN preachers, Christians have carved a divining niche no less despicable than that of the heathen druids of old. Displaced lordship is the idolatry always at our doorstep, beckoning us to bless and sanction her in any way which might appease our conscience.
May we rightly flush away these creeping appropriations that steal our hearts and restrain the relinquishing of our wills so that we may set aside striving and rest in His goodness and sovereignty, trusting that all things will indeed bend toward His glory.
