Christmas Day
Historical Context
Christmas Day falls every year on 25 December and is a paid day off in Slovakia. It is the quieter family-visiting day after the central Christmas Eve dinner.
Christmas Day has been a day of rest in Slovak lands since Christianisation. Unlike in Anglo-American tradition, where the focus is on the morning of 25 December, Slovak Christmas centres on Christmas Eve, with the 25th treated as a calmer day for visiting and worship.
Families attend morning church services (Catholics often go to a midnight mass on Christmas Eve and a daytime service on the 25th). The main meal is a Christmas dinner of roast goose, duck, or turkey with traditional sides. Visiting close family members is common. Shops are closed under the strictest mandatory closure rules.
Regional Traditions
Šariš
On Christmas Day, young men of the village walked house to house carrying a portable Betlehem (nativity), reciting verses, singing carols and beating their staves while dancing the odzemok before delivering the household blessing (vinš). Custom strictly required the lower-living neighbour to walk up to the higher-living one, never the reverse.
Zamagurie (Goral villages, Ždiar)
In the Goral villages of Zamagurie, children performed a "betlehem" puppet play of the Three Kings, going from house to house with a small theatre and a hand-made nativity. The carols are sung in the Goral dialect, traditionally described as more "temperamental" because of the shepherd voice culture of the upper Spiš valleys.
Zemplín / Šariš (rusínske obce)
On the day after the Rusyn Christmas Eve, koledníci move through the villages announcing the birth of Christ with the greeting "Christos raždajetsja — Slavite jeho." The carolers sing in Rusyn rather than Slovak and follow the Byzantine-rite calendar, so this Christmas-Day caroling falls on 7 January.