In Bohemia, a land of forests and hills where the Czech Republic stands today, winter arrives with snow up to your knees. It was there, more than a thousand years ago, that there lived the man one of the best known Christmas carols in the world sings about. The carol begins on the day after Christmas, the Feast of Stephen, when the houses still smelled of the holiday cooking. It tells how Wenceslas, the lord of that country, went to the window to see what kind of night it was.

The snow had covered everything, smooth and white, without a single footprint on it. The moon shone so brightly you could see a long way off, and the frost was cruel. That was when Wenceslas noticed, right at the far end of the field, a bent man picking up dry sticks to feed the fire at home.

Wenceslas called for his page, the boy who helped him each day.

— Come here, my lad. Do you know that man, and where he lives?

— I do, sir — said the page, pressing his cheek to the cold glass. — He lives a long way off, underneath the mountain, right against the forest fence, close by Saint Agnes' fountain.

— Then bring me meat and bring me wine, and bring pine logs as well. The two of us will carry it all to his door, and he will have a warm supper tonight.

Out they went into the snow with the baskets. At first it was almost fun, with the moon lit up above them. But the wind turned rougher, the night turned darker, the snow grew deeper, and the page began to walk slower and slower, his feet aching with cold.

— Sir, I do not think I can go on — he said, nearly stopping. — The wind is too strong for me.

— Walk behind me, close behind — answered Wenceslas. — Tread in my step, and set your foot exactly where mine has been.

The page trod where his master had trodden. And the carol says that every footprint opened in the snow held a little warmth in it, as if the ground remembered summer. So the two of them went on, one step behind the other, all the way to the forest fence. They left the meat, the wine and the logs at the poor man's door, and walked home along the same trail.

The real Wenceslas was called Václav, and he was born around the year 907. The one who raised him when he was small was his grandmother, Ludmila, who taught him to pray and to notice whoever needed help. When he grew up and became Duke of Bohemia, he kept the habit: the old chronicles say he went out at night with a single servant, carrying firewood and food to widows, orphans and prisoners. People said he did not seem like a prince so much as the father of all the poor.

Not everyone was pleased with a ruler like that. On a September morning in the year 935, while he was still young, Wenceslas was killed at the door of a church by men sent by his own brother, Boleslav. Later his brother repented and had the body carried to Prague, to the church of Saint Vitus, and to this day the Czech people call Wenceslas the patron and friend of their land.

And every December, on the other side of the world, somebody sings the story again: the king and the page walking through the snow, one step behind the other.