Kaško was in a great mood. It was December outside. It was freezing everywhere. Frost was drawing on the windows of apartments, houses, and cars at night. Kaško flew from window to window to see what the frost has drawn. He found a meadow full of flowers, clouds in a storm, clouds with sunshine, an elephant with an ant, a spider in a web, and many other wonderful frosty drawings. He didn't even realize when he got to the window behind which Maxík and Majka had their room. Smiling, he approached the window, looked at it and almost contracted a heart attack.
"What is this?" Kaško exclaimed, startled.
He looked at the window once more and became even more frightened. There were flowers painted all over the window, created by the frost. There were two puffy circles in the centre of the window that held the saddest baby eyes.
Kaško slowly approached the window and asked a bit apprehensively:
"Fellas, what happened to you?"
The children just gasped, blinked four times, and rolled their eyes twice.
"Something really serious must have happened," Kaško murmured quietly to himself.
He walked to the window and flew in through it like a true ghost. The friends didn't move, they just sighed together again.
"So, are you going to tell me what happened?" Kaško urged them.
"Well, well, well," began Maxík, turning from the window, "when we came to the country of Haravara, grandfather told us how beautiful it was here, and also how wonderful the winters were."
"Psaw, beautiful winters," Majka opposed into the window.
"And what don't you like?"
"What?!" asked Maxík, uncomprehendingly-
"We're missing snow here!" Majka turned from the window. "Every year we used to go sledding, sliding, building snowmen, snowball fights."
"Everything was beautifully white," Maxík continued.
"Ah," Kaško understood, "but you know it's not just like that."
"What's not just like that?" Majka asked incomprehensively.
"Well, snow. The real best snowman snow is made by the angels with their sugar ice," Kaško explained.
"What?" the children opened their eyes like doors to a museum.
"Every little ghost knows," Kaško did not understand their surprise, "that when it does not snow it means only one thing."
"That the angels are lazy," Maxík added mockingly.
"Oh, no. It's just that no one gave them the right angel gingerbread cookies at the agreed-upon place."
"And what are these, the real angel gingerbread cookies, and where is the agreed-upon location?" the children asked.
"These are gingerbread cookies made from real honey and according to an ancient recipe of Aunt Maria," Kaško instructed.
"Great," the friends were delighted, "we'll buy some honey in the shop and get the recipe from an Aunt Maria, too."
"Hahaha," Kaško laughed, "not every shop has real honey. In some places it's more like liquid sugar. The best place to find honey is at some honey makers."
"Do you know one?" Majka looked questioningly at Kaško.
"Of course. There are several in the country of Haravara. But in a village like Hrabušice they have made a small bee heaven."
"Bee heaven?" the children couldn't believe.
"Well," Kaško continued, "they have hives, a hotel for the bees, the most beautiful meadows far and wide, and good people who take care of the bees."
"Sounds interesting. The kids have started to be a little more cheerful, and do you think there's any real honey left?"
"Absolutely. After all, it's an apiary. If it wasn't that cold, they'd show you the inside of the hives, or how the bees store their nectar and make honey."
"Hmmm, so we're going to take a trip there with my parents in the spring," Maxík mused, "but right now we need some honey for gingerbread."
"You're right, Maxík," Kaško joined in his thoughts, "in the spring, you'll come to the apiary with your mother and father to see the bees, and now we'll go there for some good honey. And on the way, we will stop at the Spiš Castle."
"At the Spiš Castle?" the children didn't understand.
"Of course," Kaško explained to his uncomprehending friends, "there are two things we need. A recipe and an old furnace. I mean, a furnace that was built exactly as furnaces were being built in the past. That's why gingerbread baked in this oven tastes best to the angels."
"Do you really think we're going to the castle to bake gingerbread cookies?" Majka's eyes nearly fell out of their sockets.
"I guess so, let's go then."
The children put on the warmest things they had, put gloves on their hands, Kaško gave them some local booster, and soon they were hovering over the Spiš Castle.
"First we will go and get some honey, then to the castle," Kaško shouted to the children when he saw that they would like to land.
"Look, Maxík," Majka pointed a finger down below her.
"I guess this is where we are," Maxík whispered and Kaško started to descend to the ground.
Below them, various strange buildings, painted tree trunks, and a large gate were built in a circle. They landed.
"Is this the apiary here??"
"Can't you see?! There are the hives," Kaško pointed to the painted tree stump, "there is the bee hotel, there is the gate."
"I thought it was some kind of an old Indian totem, and that's the hive," Maxík wondered as he took a closer look at the hive.
"But where is the honey?" Majka looked around.
"Hold on," Kaško reassured them.
He walked over to one of the hives, rubbed his hands together and whispered something through the small gap through which the bees fly in spring and summer. A large bee head appeared in the crack with a small cap on its head.
"Kaško?" the bee-head whispered, "is that really you?"
"It is me, Your Majesty," Kaško respectfully addressed the head.
"Why are you waking me up?" The head looked reproachfully at Kaško.
"Excuse me, but we need some good honey."
"Good honey, good honey, and what for," the Queen Bee piped up.
"Look around," he pointed to the freezing countryside, "there is frost everywhere and no snow. We want to make gingerbread cookies for the angels."
"Ah," the Queen Bee understood, "so that's something completely different. We've got honey stashed away in the apiary for our best friends and in case not enough flowers grow in the spring."
"Could we get a little bit out of that?" Majka asked.
"These are my friends, Majka and Maxík," he explained to the surprised queen, "they can see the ghosts and can hear us talking. I don't know why, but that's how it is."
"My pleasure," the Queen bowed her head slightly. "Find the hive with the bee drawn on it, and underneath you will find our supply of the finest honey."
"Thank you," they all bowed to the Queen.
"Take as much as you need and come back next time," the Queen Bee called from the hive, where she had gone back to sleep. "But please don't wake me up again."
Maxík and Majka found a hive with a painted bee in the bee heaven next to a small shelter with various shavings and started digging under it. After a little while they found small cups full of honey. They took three of them.
"And now quickly to the Spiš Castle."
In a few moments, they reached the castle.
"It's really large," Maxík looked at the beautiful walls of the castle.
"It is one of the largest castles in the area," Kaško marvelled.
"It must have been wonderful here when people and castle ladies were still living here, and there were festivities and high balls," Majka started, "and feasts and dances."
"And when the best cakes in the area were being baked here," said Kaško, pointing to one of the castle's roofed buildings and running towards it.
"Wait," the children shouted, running after him.
They opened a small door and went in.
"OOOOOOO," the children opened their mouths wide standing as if charmed. They were in a beautiful, historic kitchen where everything scented, everything played with colours, everything from black to purple to white. Fire burning in an old stove that stood in the corner. On the workbench, wooden bowls with fragrant spices and various rolling pins, bowls, and boiling pots were already prepared.
Some white figures were running around the stove. When they came in, they stopped and rushed to Kaško.
"Well, at last, my friend," Kaško hugged him and gave him a cook's apron, "we thought you wouldn't be coming."
"When I say we're coming, we're coming," Kaško put his chef's hat on his head. "There's nothing more important than saving a white Christmas."
"Exactly," the little white girl squealed, "have you got it?"
Kaško tapped his fingers and pointed at Maxík. He understood and immediately took out three bottles of honey.
"These are my friends, the castle cooks of the Zápoľský family, who owned this castle as one of the last nobles," he gestured to them with a nod of his head towards his white companions, "Ondrej Jakub, Marína... meet the others yourselves."
Kaško, Jakub, Ondrej, and Marínka joined their hands, whispered something into the wind, and the soul of the ghostly library appeared. They took out a book of the oldest recipes of Mrs. Mária and started.
While everyone was preparing the dough and then cutting out different shapes of gingerbread men, they were telling Maxík and Majka about the Spiš Castle. About how there was a prehistoric settlement here, then the Celts lived here, and about 800 years ago they built a castle on this hill.
"There was an important road leading by and the castle was an excellent place to defend it," Jacob moaned and talked.
"Then the Mongol warriors invaded Slovakia, just as the whole of Europe, and the castle expanded even more to protect the whole surrounding area," Ondrej continued, "then it was rebuilt, enlarged, and completed by its other lords."
"Until it became this monumental work of art on the rock," Marínka finished this abbreviated history while cutting out the last gingerbread house.
"And our nobles couldn't afford to maintain the whole castle, so they moved elsewhere, and the castle fell into disrepair," Kaško added, putting gingerbread into the heated oven.
"And we settled here, now that we've become ghosts," Ondrej sat down on a carved wooden chair.
"And where do we take the gingerbread cookies so that the angels can sugar them?" Majka asked suddenly, wiggling her nose, because the irresistible scent of gingerbread, which belonged to Christmas like a tree, was spreading through the kitchen.
"Well, to Bethlehem, where little Jesus was born," Kaško noted.
"Are we going to Bethlehem?" the children couldn't believe their ears, "and today?"
"That's right," Kaško mused, "we probably wouldn't make it."
Jakub knocked on the table and spoke mysteriously:
"You may take the gingerbread to any place called Bethlehem. It doesn't have to be Bethlehem in Israel. All the places that are called like that are somehow connected to that Bethlehem in Israel where baby Jesus was born."
"But where do we find such a place?" the children asked desperately, looking out of the kitchen window at the sky, where the sun was already setting behind the hills of the Tatra Mountains that could be seen from there.
"Jerusalem is just near the castle," whispered Marínka.
"Jerusalem, Jerusalem," Kaško thought stiffly, "hand me a map of the world."
In turn, the little ghosts set the library in operation and opened a map of Israel.
"Show me Bethlehem." Kaško commanded.
A map of Bethlehem appeared in the air.
"You see that," smiled Kaško.
"Well, we can see, but how does it help that we can see?"
"Look closely," Kaško urged, smiling even more.
"I don't understand." Max scratched his head and Majka scratched her nose.
"Here is Bethlehem," Kaško pointed to the map, "and here, right next to it, is Jerusalem. It's like one city. Where one ends, the other begins."
"I still don't understand." Kaško's ghost friends started scratching their heads.
"All we have to do is take our gingerbread houses to Jerusalem in Spiš and put them on this city border and they will actually be in Bethlehem," Kaško tapped the map.
"I see," they all cheered.
"And will it work?" Majka questioned.
"We'll see," Kaško closed the library, "we have no other choice."
While baking gingerbread, the children learned something about Spiš Jerusalem.
More than four hundred years ago, there were several monasteries in the area. And there were also very good schools in the monasteries. The monks called Jesuits were the best teachers back then. And they were also here in the area.
"One morning one of the monks climbed the tower of the church in the Spiš Chapter and looked at the landscape with the stream, small hills, valleys and almost fell off the roof," Jakub continued in Kaško's explanation.
"Why?" Maxík whispered curiously, "did he see something terrible?"
"No," laughed Marínka, "before he came here to Haravara, the monk was in Israel, and he passed through Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Well, when he looked at the brook and those hills, he realised that it looked like Jerusalem."
"And they built various chapels and churches here. Just as they stand in Jerusalem on the famous Stations of the Cross," finished Kaško. "They built a little piece of Jerusalem here in Haravara as well."
"Fantastic!" Majka blurted out.
"It's done," Marínka exclaimed cheerfully, and they took the gingerbread cookies from the oven, put them in Maxík's backpack, and went to St. Martin's Church, which stands on the place where the Last Supper took place in Jerusalem, Israel.
"So, from there we have to go back and forth and eighteen steps in that direction and we should be on the border of Jerusalem and Bethlehem," Kaško pointed in the air.
They came to a deserted place in a beautiful winter meadow. They put gingerbread houses on the ground, looked around to see if the angels were already running around.
"There's nothing more we can do here," Kaško took his friends, shivering from cold, by the hands and carried them to the train station. There they took the fast train to Košice. Maxík and Majka were sitting impatiently and looked out the window. Maxík reached into one of his pockets and took out a jaw harp. He started to strum it slowly. The jaw harp and the regular rumbling of the train caused the children falling asleep in a moment.
"Get up!" Kaško had been whispering in their ears for quite a while.
"WHAT, are we home yet?" the children opened their eyes and saw Kaško smiling suspiciously.
"What happened to you?" Maxík asked him.
"Look out the window."
It was snowing beautifully outside the window. The children came out of the train and on their way home they were already leaving footprints in the white snow. It seemed to them that the snow smelled like gingerbread. In bed, they were imagining angels eating their gingerbread and snow falling all over the ground.
They were smiling so much that even Uncle Moon couldn't shine properly but had to hide behind a small cloud to laugh.
