School boys caroling on St. Blaise’s feast day in Dluhonice near Pÿerova (Moravia)
St. Blaise’s feast day (February 3) was a school holiday in Czech culture. Caroling evolved from the medieval rounds of teachers and pupils, who collected gifts door to door—this once formed part of the teacher’s income.
In the first half of the 19th century school children caroled and received peas, eggs, sausages and smoked meat in sacks and baskets. They collected for their teacher and themselves. They most often performed in white shirts with paper belts and tall paper caps. Simple chain dances aware a special feature of the Blaise caroling and sometimes carnival songs were incorporated.
The teacher of the great St. Blaise,
Who loves his children, leads them to goid things;
If you do not have a pupil,
Give us a piece of paper,
For a penny or two you will be a little poorer.
Finally, they added a joking song popular even in the carnival rounds:
The wolf dances with the goat,
The hussar drums for them,
The rooster happily farms.
In 1869 an act was passed that set fixed salaries for teachers and the teachers removed themselves from the caroling.
The caroling began to get out of hand as written in a chronicle:
All the collected food was sold, the money was used to buy liquor and bake pastries, and in the evening there was fun. The desks from the school were thrown into a pile and a dance hall was prepared out of the dark room. Musicians, pupils and their parents and even the school board of the village came and everybody drank. The children then danced while the parents looked on in admiration, at how skillfully they turned in a wheel. Such entertainment lasted long into the night and was said to be very noisy. During one entertainment even the stove was demolished.
Eventually these gatherings began to be banned.
In a few areas, however, the tradition continues, while watered down.
In 2002 in Dluhonice near Pÿerova (Moravia), ten children aged 6 to 14, gathered at the church with sauce pans and spoons, one with an iron spit, and another with a tin coffee box for cash.
The boys rang the bell of the house and drummed their pans along to the carol.
The spit was slowly filled with skewered sausages and the box with coins.
They gathered at one of the boy’s houses and cabbage and Blazej soup (smoked with grits) and bread were added to the sausages and an adult supervised the division of the money. The boys’ families took turns arranging the merriment.
