Author: Joyce De Ridder

Sitting in my study on Christmas Eve in 2022, while there is a blizzard outside, I am remembering fondly one of my favorite celebrations of Christmas in Slovakia. It took place probably 15 or 16 years ago and was celebrated at the end of a week in July with a group of a dozen children and half that many adults.

For three years in Slovakia we organized summer residential camps for children who had a parent addicted to alcohol. For one week these children between the ages of seven and twelve were out of their normal home environment spending time with adults and other children who understood them and knew what it was like to be growing up in a family where everything revolved around alcohol.

We had decided to make the theme of this particular week of summer camp a celebration of birthdays. Many times children who live with an alcoholic parent don’t have wonderful memories of birthday and holiday celebrations. There are times when a parent doesn’t show up or someone is drunk or maybe there is no celebration. There may be fighting and tension and sometimes more tears than laughter.

We decided we would celebrate every child’s and every adult’s birthday at camp that week. Each day of the week we celebrated all those who had a birthday in a three month period. Monday we celebrated January, February and March birthdays. On Tuesday we celebrated those who had birthdays in April, May and June, and so on through Thursday. Since the children’s parents would come for them on Saturday after lunch, we reserved Friday night to celebrate Christmas and the birth of Jesus.

Paper, and stamp art material, stickers, colored pencils and everything needed to make birthday cards and write birthday wishes were available. Every afternoon there was time to prepare cards and put them in a special mailbox to be delivered to the recipients that evening. Special desserts of cake or ice cream were on the menu each day. Everyone at camp that week had a special time to be recognized and celebrated.

Joe Ann and I had a lovely artificial tree which we brought to camp. As a part of our daily activities we prepared for our Christmas celebration. The children made the decorations for the tree – paper chains, snowflake cutouts, and more. We strung the lights and added some special ornaments. One day cookies were baked and everyone decorated cookies.

On Friday we had the Jesus birthday cake, a special round, three-layer cake with a chocolate cake layer on the bottom, strawberry in the middle layer, and a layer with green food coloring on the top. The cake had white icing and around the outer circumference of the cake were chocolate hearts and in the center of the cake was a single candle.

After we finished eating our cake, we shared its symbolism. The colored cake layers represented the reason for Jesus’ coming – our sinful, fallen nature, the blood of Christ shed for us, and new life for those who receieved his gift of eternal life by trusting in him. The round cake represented the world and the chocolate hearts the people of the world. The center candle represented Jesus, the light of the world. Then we had a short program that included the Christmas story, some singing of carols and a small candle for each child to light from the larger candle and place on top of the cake.

Finally, there were gifts. A church responsible for distributing the Samaritan’s Purse shoebox gifts to children in Slovakia had some boxes left from the last Christmas. They shared them with us and we were able to put under the tree an appropriate gift box for each boy and each girl at camp filled with games, candies, stuffed animals and other items. It was a joyful time for all of us.

Tonight I hold in my mind the joy of that July Christmas celebration, remembering each child, wondering what has become of them and saying a prayer that they have received the gift that Jesus offered them.

Dali showed us through the empty flat that was to be our new home. For sure it didn’t look like home but it had a lot going for it. There was a good-sized living room with windows that overlooked the street, a bedroom with a balcony on the backside of the flat, a guest room, and another room right inside the door to the right that would become our office; it was the only room that was carpeted. The kitchen was small but adequate. The toilet was in a tiny space like a small closet separated from the bathroom. In the bathroom was a deep tub, a sink that overlapped the tub with enough space next to it to put a washing machine.

The church placed a small refrigerator and table and chairs in the kitchen for our use until we purchased our own. The kitchen was a narrow L-shaped room. You could enter the top of the L from the entry room. It contained a small gas stove and oven, a sink, and a short counter top with cabinets above and below. You could enter the bottom side of the L from the living room. Right inside was the refrigerator and then an old-fashioned standing radiator beneath three side-by-side windows like those in the living room. The small table was pushed up against the radiator leaving room for three chairs on the open sides of the table.

The most unsual feature of the flat was that there was bright red linoleum with flecks of pink on the floors in the living room and bedrooms. It seems that when the building was erected, red linoleum was put on the odd-numbered floors and gray linoleum of the even-numbered floors.

As there were no closets in the flat, we would need to purchase wardrobes for the bedroom to hang our clothes and some kinds of shelves for storing various items. I was beginning to make a list in my head as we moved through the flat. I love to decorate and since we had to start from scratch to furnish the place, I was excited to think about what we could do with it.

When Joe Ann and I merged our belongings in our first house in Grand Rapids, we saw that we both had a lot of decorative items that were oriental – a Japanese silk screen, paintings of Chinese landscapes, celadon vases from Korea, ink sketches with black bamboo frames from Bangladesh, decorative boxes and one or two oriental figurines. This turned out to be ideal for our flat in Banska Bystrica. The red linoleum made us think Chinese!

Part of our living room with the green leather sofa and the Japanese silk screen attached to the wall by Velcro. The other half of the room is in the picture under the title of this blog post.

To go with our red living room floor we bought a black dining table that could seat six, a black etagere on which to display some of our oriental items, a dark green leather sofa and matching chair, and two other chairs with a black base and arms and an oatmeal color fabric. Since the walls were concrete, we hung our Japanese silk screen, our pictures of Chinese landscapes, and the bamboo framed ink sketches with Velcro. We added a couple of silk plants, a table lamp or two and a floor lamp we brought with us from Michigan.

The office was furnished with six tall brown bookcases set side by side covering the space of two walls. They were filled with the 2500 books we brought with us. The majority were music, theology, and addiction and recovery books. To finish the room, we added a desk and another workspace, plus a filing cabinet and a piece of furniture on which we could put a printer and store supplies in the cabinet space below.

For our bedroom we chose a white chest of drawers and white wardrobes. Our floral bedspreads were forest green. In the guest bedroom we placed two Slovak beds, a blond wardrobe and chest of drawers.

The small three-drawer chest we brought with us was in the entry room along with a small white stand and chair for our telephone. On the floor was an octagonal area rug with an oriental design.

Almost all our furniture was purchased at a nabytok (furniture store) one block from our flat. I’m sure they were happy to see us coming time and time again, although they found some of our purchases strange.

The two items not bought there were our appliances. We bought a refrigerator with a freezer section below that was a product of Sweden and a washing machine that was German made. The refrigerator was different enough that everyone who came to our flat took a look inside.

More than thirty American visitors spent time in that flat over the eight plus years we lived there; many stayed overnight. Slovaks in multiples of that number were in and out of our home over the years. We laughed, cried, had dinner parties, counseled individuals, read, prayed, played games, watched movies on the little television that played American VHS tapes, and worked in that space.

Before going to bed on air mattresses that first night, our container parked on the street waiting for another day to be unloaded after paperwork was done, we walked through the rooms again and prayed that God would be honored by the things that took place within those walls.

Writing this brings a flood of memories, a feeling of joy and gratitude, and a sense of peace that we made that flat into a haven for ourselves and others. I felt good about being home every time I walked in the door.