You gotta love Czech Christmas traditions. While other holiday traditions may be more fun, likethe spanking of women for Easter, our Christmas traditions revolve mostly around food. But they are equally as odd and fun.
First things first: we celebrate Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. Yes, we do not torture our children by having them wait the entire night for the presents. Oh, the sleepless nights saved! Our main meal is fried carp with potato salad. Carps are being sold during the week leading up to Christmas on the streets from barrels full of water and fish. Today the vendors will kill and filet the fish on the spot, but when we were kids, parents would buya live carp and have it in the bathtub until the Christmas Eve so that it was fresh when we ate it, which meant you had a little pet for a week... and then you ate it. Taught you a lesson. Never trust your friends. Zuzi's little brother used to take baths with the carp and liked to kiss it… and hasn't eaten a single one since he realized what happened to it later.
(What follows is a Christmas scene from "Pelisky", a Czech comedy. Two brothers argue about one of the brothers' ability to hold breath underwater. There is only one way to find out... At the end of the scene, the wet brother admits to not having the heart to kill the carp that swims in the bathtub.)
The potato salad is also a serious matter that has been know to split households. Every family has its own, which creates frictions among the in-laws. Some people put ham in it, which is quite at odds with the imperative that no meat should be eaten on Christmas Eve. Also, potato salad with ham in it is much inferior to the classic Viennese potato salad, which is served in our families and is therefore clearly the best (wink wink). To top it all up, the leftovers of the cried carp are pickled and served a few days later as “Pecenace”. Sounds pretty bad but it is delicious. If you want to tried this, head over to Cestr. It is one of the most surprising and favorite dishes we serve in some of our food tours.
The cruelest Czech Christmas tradition is the Christmas Eve fast. You don’t eat anything until the dinner so that you get to see the “golden piglet”. In theory. Because in practice you are simply defenseless against the smells of the sausage with wine, the carp, fish soup and potato salad, so you simply nibble away here and there. Another tradition is the “vanocka”, the classic Czech Christmas bread that is dense and tastes a bit like brioche bread and often includes raisins and almonds. If you want to taste a great version, head over to Maso a kobliha. They sell a great version made by Juliana, arguably the most famous bread blogger around.
One of the most important, and surely the most fattening, Czech Christmas traditions is the baking of Christmas cookies. In many families, Christmas baking ends up dominating all December weekends, really, at least among moms and their daughters. All the advertisements in the media before Christmas tend to revolve around butter, cocoa powder, sugar and nuts, only to be replaced in January by advertisements for gym memberships and low fat yoghurts. Yes, the calorie intake over Christmas is huge but you know what? The cookies are delicious so who cares?
Christmas baking may at time get competitive, as people reunite at work on Mondays to top their colleagues with the number of the different varieties they prepared over the weekend. The idea is to make the Christmas cookies as small as possible and to prepare as many different varieties as possible. The most convenient storage compartment for the cookies is the humble shoe box, so when you walk through the residential parts of Prague over the holidays, you may spot a few boxes here and there on the balconies.
Now, every family has a repertoire of “tried and tested" cookies that cannot be missing on the Christmas table. Now you can bake your own with Zuzi’s grandma’s recipes for the Linzer cookies andvanilla crescents, two of the classics. Be careful: both are highly addictive and you may end up making several more batches and putting on more weight than you had originally planned. Which is probably the most traditional Czech tradition of them all. In any case, we wish you a Merry Christmas! Bake responsibly, ok?
