Palm Sunday – opens Holy Week and Easter begins!

Palm Sunday is formally the sixth and final Sunday of Lent – the one that opens Holy Week and stands exactly one week before Easter. Easter Sunday.

Do you remember that feeling? You wake up in the morning and it's not warm outside yet, but the air no longer smells like winter. Somewhere between the bedroom and the kitchen, you realize it's Palm Sunday. And something inside you - deep down, where the things you inherited from your grandmother reside - quietly rejoices.

It's no coincidence. There's something about this day that transcends the calendar and the church year. It's that rare moment when the old and the new, the pagan and the Christian, the personal and the communal, blend so naturally that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. And that's exactly what I love about it.

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It reminds us of the moment when Jesus entered Jerusalem and people threw palm branches at his feet. But since palm trees don't grow in the Czech Republic - and let's face it, they never did - our ancestors took what they had at hand.

And I always think to myself: how wise that was. Not to blindly adopt, but to adapt. To take something foreign and make it something of our own, domestic, genuine. After all, that's something that we women have always been good at.

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is much older than Christianity itself – and this is not an unnecessary side note, this is something that always moves me. The pagan roots say one thing: people have long felt that nature is alive, that spring is a miracle, that the first buds are more than just botany. They are promises. And we believe them because we have survived enough springs to know that promises are fulfilled.

The consecrated kittens were carried home and stuck behind crosses and holy images. The farmer stuck them in the field as a thank you for the harvest. They were placed under the threshold of the house so that nothing bad would enter. It was not superstition – or rather, it was, but of the most beautiful variety. The kind that believes that the home can be protected, that love and care have a physical form, that a twig with a kitten above the door says: here we are home, here we are safe.

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The day itself has its own rhythm, and it is beautiful in its simplicity. In the morning you will dress in clean clothes – new clothes if you have them, because women always wore something new on Palm Sunday so that they would bloom all year long.

long before we had the English word for it. Then a walk – into nature, to the cats, to the trees that are just getting ready. And with that feeling of gratitude that comes by itself when you stand among the branches and know that this is repeated, repeated and repeated – with you and without you, after you and before you.

– that is up to each of us. But that pause, that conscious entry into a week that is different from the others? That has value regardless of faith.

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After lunch – soup, green beans, potatoes, cookies baked the day before. They talk. And if you’re lucky, there’s someone sitting at the table who remembers how their grandmother used to do it. How she used to bring the twigs wrapped in a wet rag so they wouldn’t wilt. How she used to put them in a vase on the window and how by evening the buds had thickened and puffed up like little silver eggs.

Such moments are what cannot be sold or copied. What only exists when we create it ourselves. And Palm Sunday is exactly that – to remind us that it is time.

Time to stop. To get dressed. To take the pussies in your hand and feel how soft they are. And to know that this – just this – is enough.

Easter: Tradition, Faith, and the Awakening of Life