After Christmas Eve supper, an apple is sliced into pieces equal to the number of people at the table. Each person takes a slice, and the host shares an ancient promise: if anyone finds themselves lost, they need only remember eating the apple together, and they will find their way home.
An authentic Bohemian tradition
“The head of the family would cut an apple into as many pieces as there were people around the table and handed them out to each and every one of them. They would then eat their part of the apple. They believed that if they lost their way somewhere away from home in the next year, all they needed to do was to remember all the other people who were sharing the Christmas Eve dinner with them and they would find the way home.”
Radio Prague International — Christmas in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands
The Musel family connection
This tradition originates from Bohemia-Moravia, which encompasses most of the current Czech Republic. Matej Musel (born 1804, died 1898) was the patriarch who brought this tradition to America when his family immigrated in 1851.
During genealogy research in the late 1970s and early 1980s, David Musel discovered descendants of one of Matej’s sons in northern Minnesota. When asked about the Christmas Eve Apple tradition, a family member recalled participating as a child, though they had not observed it in recent years—confirming the tradition’s presence in multiple branches of the immigrated family.