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Towns and villages around the Czech Republic are dressed up for Christmas, with centrally-placed Christmas trees, Christmas markets, Nativity scenes, thousands of twinkling lights and live music. Have a look at what the Christmas atmosphere is like in different parts of the country.

Czechs are spending increasing amounts of money on Christmas, according to a survey carried out by the agency Nielsen Admosphere. The average amount Czechs will spend on Christmas shopping this year is CZK 12,297, which is CZK 1,310 more than last year.

The traditional Christmas tree lighting ceremonies marking the start of Advent are taking place on town squares around the country this weekend. The event is now frequently accompanied by video-mapping and live music.

Prague’s largest Christmas market opened on Old Town Square on Saturday and will be accompanied by daily cultural events and concerts up until January 6th.

The tree-lighting ceremony on Old Town Square first took place at 4.30 pm and will be repeated at every next hour up until 9.30 pm in order to accommodate visitors.

The tiny post office in the West Bohemian mountain town of Boží Dar – meaning God’s gift –has started processing huge amounts of Christmas mail from around the country and abroad.

The post office annually stamps hundreds of thousands of Christmas greetings with a special Christmas stamp, making these letters a popular collector’s item for the sender and recipient.

It is also the post office to which Czech children send letters to Baby Jesus or Ježísek telling him what they’d most like to get for Christmas. In the course of December the post with its four employees gets on average 15 kilograms of mail a day.

This year’s stamp, designed by Pavel Sivko, is a Christmas motif of floating candles in nutshells.

Every year a municipality in some part of the Czech Republic donates a Christmas tree for Prague’s Old Town Square. This year people will be able to admire a 22-metre tall spruce from the town of Semily, north-east of Prague. You can follow its journey to Prague on sledujstromek.cz.

A Norway spruce destined for the Christmas market in Prague’s Old Town was felled on Sunday and is slowing making its way by special transport from the Liberec region to the Czech capital.

The 55-year-old tree was chosen from dozens of contenders to be the centrepiece of the traditional yuletide market. When felled, the spruce stood 29 metres high and 5.5 metres wide, and weighed nearly nine tons.

People can follow the tree’s journey on the website sledujstromek.cz. The lighting ceremony takes place on Saturday, November 30, at 16:30.

Czechia is where East meets West. This may sound like an empty cliché that many other countries or even cities use to promote themselves. But it is definitely true that this country in Central Europe is roughly divided into two culturally distinct parts. Doctor Jana Poláková is an ethnographer in the Moravian Museum in Brno. As she explains, Christmas is a good time to observe the differences between the folklore in different parts of the country.

Veselé Vánoce! Hello and a very Merry Christmas to you all from Radio Prague! I’m Brian Kenety, and I’ll be your guide for today’s special programme, in which we explore how the holiday is traditionally celebrated here in the Czech lands.

Joy Bellefontaine is Acadian French and proud of it, but having married a Czech husband and living in the Czech Republic for nearly 20 years she admits her family’s Christmas contains a mix of local and Acadian traditions. Tom McEnchroe, visited her to find out how foreigners living in the country celebrate their Christmas.

His ancestors were among the most influential nobility in Bohemia, but unlike many others, they chose to remain in Czechoslovakia after the communist takeover. Now Děpolt Czernin is doing his best to protect a famous Czech tradition – “Ježíšek”. He has founded a society devoted to bringing the likeness of baby Jesus back into the public sphere.