You have sent us many interesting but also funny stories for our Christmas competition. Today we have selected two for you that could have a common headline "Small Christmas accidents". We had a lot of fun with them.

Dostoevsky's Christmas salad

Mária Ferčáková

For the last few years, we have been going to visit our grandchildren in Poland for Christmas. There are a lot of us at the table, almost a dozen. We speak Slovak, Polish, Russian and English, and all at once and loudly. My daughter's cat, full name Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, or Fedia for short, also tries to talk, pardon meow, but you can't hear him at all in the noise. So he tries to attract us with other skills, such as knocking down a tree, taking a box with gifts to his house, or improving the quality of Christmas potato salad.

So he did it a few years ago. He jumped on the table and straight into the salad bowl. And now what???

"It doesn't matter,"  said the male crew of the Christmas table calmly.

"It doesn't matter!" shouted the female staff of the Christmas table.

And we went to break the speed record in slicing potato salad. Fortunately, there were plenty of skilful hands. Only, one big essential LEN, there was not a drop of mayonnaise. So we made the mayonnaise homemade. And it was so tasty and good that since then we have been making Christmas potato salad with only homemade mayonnaise. We call it Dostoevsky's Christmas salad .

Frightened godmother

Lukáš Kostišče

It was 23.12.1998 and I was 10 years old. My parents and I went to my grandmother's house for holidays together. It was a day full of preparations and hustle and bustle, but I was only interested in the snow and the bunker made of snow. I was soaked, but satisfied, outside in my little bunker. After dinner, I took a bath, changed into my pajamas and lay down... When I suddenly hear footsteps and look at the Christmas tree with one eye. Someone is standing there and putting presents under the tree from a bag. When I saw this, I was delighted and shouted with joy Yup!

That's when it started. It wasn't Santa Claus, but my godmother who thought I was sleeping. My scream frightened her so much that she threw away the bag with gifts, smashed the cakes by the tree and threw down the tree with the lights.

Suddenly, mom, dad and grandma came running and when they saw the fallen tree, the scared godmother and me looking at the situation, they started laughing. They knew right away that I probably scared the godmother. We remember this story every Christmas as a memory of how Lukáš caught the godmother and woke up the whole house.

Christmas is not about gifts, but about shared experiences.  That is why we have a long tradition that we meet every year on December 26 and a smaller hike takes place, where we burn Christmas calories together.  When it's nice and it's snowing outside, we also take a sledge, build a snowman and create family experiences. We then remember every Christmas according to the hikes and places we have been to and not according to the years.