Baby Jesus can live in virtual space and use a courier service for gifts delivery.
Although it is not very mysterious or romantic, families that rely on the internet version of Baby Jesus can avoid disappointment when unwrapping their gifts. Everyone chooses their own gits themselves, posts their list for example on the website www.milyjezisku.cz and sends a link to their wish list via email to those who are looking to give them something.
Over 20,000 have chosen to have virtual Christmas by arranging them on this website.
Carp online
More and more Czechs do not rely on internet only with presents, but also with Christmas provisions.
For example carp can be purchased without leaving one’s home. You fill in the online order on www.kaprik.cz and specify whether the fish should be finned, gutted or even cut into fillets, and then it gets delivered to your front door at a pre-arranged time.
“I tried the online order for the first time when I got the flu,” Petr Stejskal from Prague explains how ordering carp online has become a tradition for him.
Prices of carp ordered via internet start at CZK 200. You have to pay extra for more weight and services like gutting or skinning. They will kill the fish for free for you.
Households that do not have time for Christmas cooking or do not feel like it can order ready-made Christmas Eve dinner of several courses instead of a boned carp. You can get anything: from a carp with potato salad and mushroom “kuba” [traditional Czech dish with peeled barley and mushrooms] for several hundred to a sumptuous menu from the French restaurant in Prague’s Municipal House.
A menu from local delicacies that includes, for example, roasted deer loin or creamy custard from “kotrč” mushroom, costs almost CZK 2,5000 per person.
Takeaway lobster
A “takeaway” version of the festive menu is offered mainly by the more luxurious restaurants that do not offer takeaway services throughout the year.
“People choose meals they would not cook themselves. For example lobster soup,” hotel Alcron’s spokeswoman Martina Pavlíková says about their Christmas customers.
Hotel restaurants usually do not provide delivery service and their guests pick up the menu themselves.
More and more households are choosing a similar system also with Christmas cookies. Renowned enterprises have recorded such a big interest that they had to stop taking orders already last weekend.
“We thought that we will take orders until December 15, but we cannot take more orders,” says Robert Buchner, operations director of Erhart Café’s at Prague’s Letná. His people will bake over 200 kilos of Christmas cookies this year.
Those who want to have not only sweet but also a little bit exotic holiday can order for example Italian Christmas bread panettone instead of vanilla cookies or Linz shortbread cookies. Via online order of course.
Translated with permission by the Prague Daily Monitor.
