Thirteen thousand Czechs have bought property on the moon. No time for a hand-written card. But home-made Christmas cookies are a must! And if you can’t bake them, at least crochet them. Find out more in Magazine with Daniela Lazarova.
We may be in the midst of a global crisis but things can’t be all that bad when you consider that 13 thousand Czechs have bought property on the moon, at least according to information made available by the Lunar Embassy in the Czech Republic. An acre is available for 999 crowns for which you get a certificate, an exact description of the property’s location and a copy of the Lunar constitution, so that you know exactly what your rights are, should you decide to spend a weekend there. Filip Rajchart from the Lunar Embassy started the business a few years ago and says that with the Czech Republic he’s been lucky. The Lunar Embassy in Slovakia only managed to sell 3 thousand acres. Clearly Czechs are by far the more gullible of the two nations or else they have money to burn.
At the start of December foreigners in the Czech Republic notice an interesting phenomenon – people shopping at the supermarket pile their carts high with sugar, butter, nuts and spices which you would expect to last them for at least three months. What’s happening is that Czech housewives are switching to Christmas mode – a time when many of them work by day and bake by night. In most households Christmas cookies are made from scratch and many families bake as many as 12 different kinds – Lincer cookies, vanilla rolls, gingerbread hearts, coconut kisses, chocolate baskets and many, many more. Throughout the 20th century family recipes were handed down from generation to generation, often recipes which people’s grandmothers learnt in special schools for housewives and homemakers in the years of the First Republic. These schools were later banned by the communists since women were supposed to go out and work and not just care for their families. Shops sold mass produced Christmas cookies but the vast majority of women still prided themselves on making their own – the more kinds the better. Baking started in late November and each batch of cookies was carefully packed in boxes with a slice of apple to keep them moist. The endless rounds of baking kept homes smelling of Christmas spices throughout the month of December and created an atmosphere that was indelibly linked to Christmas – something that children remembered and wanted to recreate for their own kids when they grew up. Consequently Christmas baking is one tradition that our hectic lifestyle has done little to change. Not surprisingly Christmas cookies are now available over the Internet at the click of a mouse. However few people are willing to settle for that and even families who buy take-away Chinese and pizza dinners to save time all year round make a special effort to bake at least one batch of their own Christmas cookies. In fact a poll conducted recently suggests that eighty percent of Czechs still bake their own Christmas cookies. And anyone who has ever tasted home-made cookies knows why.
Photo: CTK
The only problem with Christmas cookies is that every household makes tons of them and they are not eaten on Xmas eve alone. They are for the family to nibble on, for visitors and friends who drop in over the holidays and for colleagues at work. For anyone unfortunate enough to be on a diet they are an absolute disaster. It is hard to go anywhere without getting pressed to try at least one of each and by the end of the Christmas holidays everyone feels like they don’t want to see a Christmas cookie for another year and the cookies have settled nicely in a spare tire around people’s hips. Renata Kučerová from Ostrava has found a solution for those who are truly desperate – she sells crocheted cookies. Originally she made them for a friend who lives in the States. My friend was terribly homesick and I knew that there was no way real cookies would survive the trip so I decided to crochet them and then washed them in different fabric conditioners to make them smell nice. Soon her neighbours were asking for some to hang on their Xmas tree and today she is doing a good business selling them over the internet.
Christmas is undisputedly the most popular holiday of the year – with nine out of ten Czechs saying they look forward to the festive Christmas season. Ninety seven percent of respondents said they kept at least a few of the Czech Christmas traditions – such as decorating a tree, eating fried carp and cookies, giving each other gifts and lighting an advent wreath –on four successive Sundays - in the run up to Christmas eve. Although many of the old traditions are outdated – such as that of a young girl throwing a shoe over her head to find out if she is to be married in the course of the coming year, or for the family to weave a chain around their feet during the Christmas meal to keep them together, some are still quaint enough to be remembered and easy enough to perform. People still put a fish scale under their plate for good luck, pour led into a basin of water to see what the future will bring, and slice an apple into two to see if the pips form a star – which means they will be healthy in the coming year. Increasingly Czechs see Christmas as a time to give to charity and many families have made a habit of helping in whatever way they can afford to – and of course Christmas has always been a time to remember the departed so many families head for the graveyard to lay a wreath and light a candle on the last Sunday before Christmas. The only area where tradition is on the wane is in the cards and presents department – with fewer and fewer people sending hand-written Christmas cards and even fewer taking the time to make a gift for someone they love. The words Veselé Vánoce or Merry Christmas now appear largely in email and sms messages – and Czechs top the European ladder in the number they send every year.
