As the last tiny fireballs shot into the tree, marking the end of this bizarrely belated Christmas celebration, my Czech friend's father, Ladia, looked at me and giggled nervously.

Was he happy we didn't burn down this bone-dry pine tree in their living room? Or was there something else I was missing. Did he know this was it--that I would be emancipating myself from this family and never be back to ease the misery of their lives? I set my deadened sparkler down on the formica coffee table and turned away from the dry Christmas tree, quickening my pace toward the front door where my jacket was hanging. I'm never coming back here, I thought. Never.

How did I get to the point where I walked out on a family that took me in for the last and final time? This was the end of my most bizarre Christmas I ever spent. The most bizarre Christmas I ever spent in late January, that is.

Lenka, a 22-year-old college student living in Prague, and a friend of a friend, had arranged a short-term apartment for me when I arrived in the Czech capital for a long stay.

Which is why I didn't mind going to Lenka's parents' house in north Bohemia my first weekend in the Czech Republic. Besides that, Lenka insisted I go. Usti nad Labem, which, translated into English, means "Usti above the Elbe River," only sounds romantic. During the three-hour ride north from Prague, we passed ruined castles perched on high cliffs and a myriad of small towns whose main feature was a bulbous Baroque-era spire. Then we arrived in Usti, where post-World-War II-era buildings--tall, concrete block apartment structures, the architectural equivalent of Soviet realism--dominate the city the way spires do in Prague. Unlike the Czech capital, Usti didn't escape World War II without damage. A few modest Baroque and neo-Gothic churches and a small 19th-century opera house dot the city, wedged between drab, functionalist shopping centers with relief sculptures of proud, barrel-chested workers. The wide river and surrounding green hills could not save Usti from looking like the love child of Dubuque and some horrible Soviet's vision of paradise.

I had walked for an hour in the northern Bohemian spa town Karlovy Vary looking for a place to eat. I have a general rule when I'm in these tourist-crammed towns: no hotel restaurants and no obvious tourist trap eateries, of which this town formerly known as Carlsbad has plenty. I walked along the babbling Tepla River reciting the words to the Joni Mitchell's heartbreaking "River," a song I haven't been able to get out of my head lately. I strolled until the prettied-up 19th-century buildings faded into grim 20th-century Communist-era apartment blocks and the over-priced restaurants morphed into pubs where the night's main entertainment was two dogs wildly humping each other in the corner as bar patrons gleefully rooted them on (well, at least at one of the places I popped my head into).

As darkness began to envelope the town, I turned back toward the center and walked until I found a pub with a sign for Platan, an excellent south Bohemian beer, a rare sight here among the signs for Pilsner Urquell and Budweiser (the Czech variety). I stopped in to the five-table pub. There were no amorous hounds inside; just quiet-talking couples taking up all the tables but one. I sat down, ordered a beer and a klobasa and dove into a book, figuring I'd settle in for another melancholy evening of sipping better-than-average beer and reading about Burma. Within a few minutes, though, three middle-aged women joined me at the table. They didn't speak English, so they began asking me questions in Czech. Where was I from? How did I speak Czech? Do I have children?

They laughed at my bad jokes and feigned interest in what I had to say about my life. Finally, I was able to ask something: "What brings you to Karlovy Vary?" All three of the ladies put their hands to their chest and said, in unison, "We're sick."

My heart sunk, but I should have known better. It's the reason why most people come to Karlovy Vary. After all, for centuries everyone from the rich and royal to the ordinary have been gravitating here to "take the waters," which flow liberally from fountains throughout the colonnaded center of town. The mineral waters are said to have curative properties and today people the world over limp around Karlovy Vary, drinking from the natural springs in between spa treatment appointments.

There's a specter haunting Central Europe. A very quaffable, sweet-tasting specter, that is. And no, it's not absinthe. This bibulously inspired drink is only around for a few weeks in September. Which means there's much debauchery happening right now in the center of Europe. If, like me, you're in the Czech capital this week, you'll understand when I say that it's the most dangerous beverage in Prague.

Meet Burcak [pronounced Bur-chahk], a Central European phenomenon where vintners take a batch of the young wine just after the grapes have been crushed, add sugar, and let it ferment a bit. The result is something that's no longer grape juice yet not exactly wine. And it tastes dangerously close to an addictive juice concoction, which nearly ensures a hangover in the morning. As far as I can tell, it's only available in the Czech Republic and Austria (in the latter it's called sturm)

The word "burcak" is just starting to pop up in Prague right now, scrawled across chalkboards that hang outside wine bars. So if you're in or heading to Central Europe, don't miss the small window with which burcak is available. Burcak purists, however, will tell you it's best drunk in southern Moravia, the main wine region of the Czech Republic, particularly in the town of Znojmo.

The last time I took a trip to the region, it was as if some alien intoxicant had overtaken an entire town. When my Czech friend Libor and I pulled into Mikulov, a small castle-topped town on the Czech-Austrian border, there were guys weaving down the tiny cobbled lanes, women vomiting into rubbish bins on the main square, and couples passionately disrobing each other behind trees. What was going on?

There's not enough beer in Bohemia to ever help you pronounce Ceske Budejovice, a Czech town located in southern Bohemia, about 100 miles from Prague. But there is at least one reason why you should go there.

Why? Let's go back to the early 1870s, when soon-to-be major beer magnate Adolphus Busch and his friend/business partner Carl Conrad decided to do a European beer crawl, hitting the great centers of all things beer in Central Europe. Bohemians have long been known for their prowess in brewing (just go to the town of Pilsen, or Plzen in Czech, if you're in doubt). Busch and Conrad made a special point to go to Ceske Budejovice because the town had a reputation for producing exceptionally good beer and the hops that grew in the fields around the it were (and still are) world renowned. Busch and Conrad sampled the local brew and were duly impressed.

So impressed, in fact, that Conrad bought the trademark for the name of one of the town's famed beers, which was named after the town. Not Ceske Budejovice, but its German name. Before World War II many towns in Bohemia boasted a sizeable German population and thus, each town had a Czech and German name. Ceske Budejovice's German name was--wait for it--Budweis.

Let us consider the beer garden. For many of us, the lasting imagine of this outdoor suds-flowing extravaganza is one of older gentlemen showing great prowess in swinging one-liter steins of beer while lederhosen-clad musicians hammer out polka tunes on accordions. Sausages are consumed. Women in dirndls patrol the aisles, six or eight mugs of beer clasped between their fingers, plopping them in front of anyone who's swinging an empty.

This was far from the scene at the beer garden where I was imbibing late last week. There wasn't an accordion or gray head in sight. Instead, MGMT blared from the speakers and young men (and women) in ironic t-shirts and baseball caps (one guy wearing an '80s-era Milwaukie Brewers cap, fittingly enough), were laughing and toasting and slamming their empty pint glasses down. Here is where one might be tempted to insert a cliché phrase about this not being your vater's biergarten; I'll resist. I was actually in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, hipster mecca, and home of a a few new beer gardens.

Which is rather significant when put in the context of the history of New York's outdoor drinking spots (a history surely everyone knows, right? Right). For decades, New York City had only one beer garden. Bohemian Hall (known to most New Yorkers as "the beer garden in Astoria") is of Czech provenance, and opened in 1911, a time when beer culture was at an acme in the United States (more on that later). In the last few years, however, there has been an overflow of beer gardens opening in New York, a welcome sign for a city that has long lacked adequate outdoor drinking venues. Big Apple beer gardens are making a comeback.

The last thing I wanted to do before I got to Olomouc [pronounced Oh-low-moatz], a town in the north-eastern part of the Czech Republic, was eat cheese that reeked of unwashed feet. But there I was, in a village just outside of the historic university town, at a museum dedicated to the planet's stinkiest milk derivative. Fans of Olomouc cheese--or, in Czech, Olomoucke tvaruzky--have cause for celebration: the European Union recently granted geographical indication (GI) status on this malodorous dairy product. Which means it now has something in common with Champagne, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and mozzarella bufala di Campana.

But GI status is where the commonalities end. Every time I'd come within five feet of Olomouc cheese in a Czech supermarket dairy counter, the foul smell would announce its presence to my nostrils. A friend in Prague once bet me to eat some. I lost. My mission, I decided during my visit to this off-the-radar town, was to finally fulfill the dare.

Noses have been wrinkling at the stench of Olomouc cheese for at least a half a millennia. Rudolf II, the eccentric 17th-centruy ruler of the Holy Roman Empire who made his home in Prague, is said to have been a fan. But Rudolf may have thrown me in with his pet lions if he knew my hesitation to try it.

So it was even odder that I standing in the epicenter of stank. As unlikely as a guy named Cletus at the opera; Dick Cheney participating in a drum circle; A New Yorker giving up a subway seat for a pregnant woman. Inside the cheese museum, a video in Czech went through hundreds of years of the cheese's history, showing courageous women loading the jaundiced silver-dollar-size cakes of cheese from the conveyor belt to the basket while the triumphant soundtrack of Chariots of Fire played in the background. The excitable geriatric docent who showed us around the museum's ancient cheese-making instruments should be awarded a medal - a golden nosey award, perhaps - for his enthusiasm for stinky cheese. When the tour was over, I took a deep breath, evved myself up to finally make good with the dare, and headed for the gift shop.

When I got off the train in a barren-looking town in eastern Bohemia, I was initially alarmed. Communist-era apartment blocks rose to the sky and broken down cars from the '70s were plopped in front of houses. It wasn't supposed to look like this.

I was in Kutna Hora (or, more accurately, its neighboring town, Sedlec). Thirty miles east of Prague, this east Bohemian town (and its ugly sibling, Sedlec) has become a fairly common day trip for travelers. But only just recently did it get attention from the mainstream travel press when the New York Times travel section ran an article about it. Gadling, too, has cast its gaze upon this east Bohemian town.

The Czech town's short brush with wealth came with the discovery of silver, making it for a time in the late-Middle Ages, the mint of Europe. In the process, the wealthy citizens built a massive Gothic cathedral-St. Barbara's, which could rival any in Europe when it comes to gothic splendor-a network of cobblestone streets, and a number of late-Gothic and Renaissance houses. But that's not exactly what draws so many people here.

It's all about the bone church. Lovely bones, in fact. The Church of All Saints Ossuary boasts an interior that's decorated with the bones of 40,000 human skeletons.

[Flickr photo thanks to CxOxS]

When I was young, my dad liked to narrate Santa Claus' travels to me on Christmas Eve. I'd hang on his every word as he'd announce, just after dinner, "Welp, Santa should be pulling into China right now." A few hours later, around 9 p.m. St. Nick would reportedly be in Australia, and by 11 p.m., about the time I'd go to bed, dad would inform me that Santa had made the jump to Europe. California, it always seemed, was his last stop. But I know better now: China? Santa Claus wouldn't go to China! If I'd been in college at that point, I would have called my dad a cultural imperialist.

In fact, Santa doesn't even visit every European country. At least not in theory, though he's knocking on the door. There are a scores of Christmas rituals that don't involve ol' St. Nick. And in general, yuletide traditions across the Atlantic usually involve one main thing: stuffing the face.

Here are some of the top non Santa Claus European Christmas traditions.

[Photo by Feuillu via Flickr]