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The light of Bethlehem, traditionally brought to the Czech Republic from Vienna by a group of scouts, is due to arrive in Brno just after 6.30 pm on Saturday. In the course of next week it will be taken to key destinations around the country and placed in churches and institutions from which people can take it to their homes. It will also burn at the Czech Radio building on Vinohradská street in Prague. The tradition of bringing the light of Bethlehem to the Czech Republic started in 1990 a year after the fall of communism.

The lights on a Christmas tree at a Christmas market on Prague’s Old Town Square were turned on for the first time this year on Saturday afternoon. The illuminations on the 26-metre pine tree were switched on by veteran actress Hana Maciuchová and Jakub Kohák, an entertainer and director of commercials. A tree at Prague Castle will be lit up on Sunday, the first of advent, by Ivana Zemanová, the wife of the president.

A 26-metre-tall pine has been felled in Nespeky, near Benešov to serve as this year's Christmas tree on the Old Town Square. The owner gave to go-ahead for the tree, which stood for more than 70 years, to be cut down. Organisers chose the winner from a list of 17 trees around the country. Transport of the pine will require the city’s Pařížská Street to be cleared of parked vehicles well in advance.

Although Christmas is still weeks away, Christmas decorations are filling shopping malls and supermarkets and by all accounts salespeople can look forward to high profits. With confidence in the economy growing, Czechs are ready to go on a spending spree.

Meteorologists say that in certain parts of the Czech Republic Czechs enjoyed the warmest Christmas in over a century. The monitoring station in Opava, Silesia, measured a high of 8.7 degrees on Christmas Day which broke a 151-year-old record. Přerov reported a high of 9.3 degrees Celsius, the highest in 140 years. Temperatures tend to be higher in the Czech capital where the warmest Christmas ever monitored was in 1983 where the Klementinum monitoring station recorded 14.6 degrees Celsius.

Prague is gearing up for end-of-year celebrations, with thousands of people expected to join the annual mega-party on Wenceslas Square. Also, with 180,000 tourists about to descend on the Czech capital hotels and restaurants are stocking up on champagne and preparing gourmet menus for the big night.

The Czech Hydrometeorological Institute says that colder winter temperatures could hit the Czech Republic towards the end of January, falling to as low as -14 degrees Celsius. Until now, the country has seen unseasonably mild weather; at Christmas, some areas saw records broken.

This year's Christmas holidays were the quietest in 20 years regarding thefts and break-ins, the police revealed, saying - tongue-in-cheek - that even crooks had respected the 'spirit' of the holidays, writes Czech news website Novinky. According to officials, break-ins were registered in apartment buildings in bigger cities but less in the countryside, where owners are more likely to be home over the Christmas break. Overall, the police had to respond to fewer 158 calls. In one incident, officers arrested a 24-year-old car thief who had driven only a few metres in a stolen vehicle before falling asleep.

President Miloš Zeman’s end-of-year address, which aired on Czech Television and the commercial TV Nova on 26 December, attracted the least viewers of all the presidential New Year’s addresses in the past 6 years. Approximately 1,266,000 people over the age of 15 watched the pre-taped program, almost 700 thousand viewers fewer that last year’s address by Václav Klaus. Television producers said that one of the reasons for the low viewership is that the President’s Office did not announce the change of the date of the address until quite late, and many people did not find out about it in time. Mr. Zeman haddecided to give his address to the nation over Christmas, instead of on New Year’s Day, as his predecessors have done since 1948.

Czech internet shops saw an increase in sales this Christmas season. Some online stores registered a year-on-year growth for the holiday season of around 40 percent. Others saw a weaker increase, but all the biggest e-shops confirmed that this Christmas was more successful than last year, and holiday shopping began earlier, due to the central bank’s intervention against the crown, which began in November. The biggest internet retailer in electronics, Alza.cz, announced that the three strongest days, in terms of sales, were between December 16 and 18. Total daily sales were approximately the same for Alza each of those days, reaching way above 100 million crowns.