Classics at Christmas

In January 2006, when I started this blog, anything I wrote about things Spanish was new. With the passing years repetition crept in. Nowadays I often repeat things. I have almost no alternative. My only hope is that new readers will think the regurgitated topics are new.

I was playing with the idea of writing, yet another, Christmas piece, then I considered the number of seasonal entries I've written over the years. Thinking economy of effort and suchlike I decided to do a BBC and to trot out the old stuff again as though it were classic. I have to say that even just tagging up the entries bored me after a while. I hope they don't bore you right from the start and whatever number you plough through, before surrendering, you find something informative or amusing or, at least, readable.  

Click on the link to get to the older post. Sorry about all the repetition over the years and please remember that what was true in the past may have changed slightly over time.

Christmas begins The Christmas lottery

They think it's all over This one's about how the dates of Christmas are not the same as in the UK

Eating at Christmas A self explanatory title I think

And some lemons for the prawns This one is about differences between UK and Spanish Christmases

17 million Spaniards or 63% of the population earn less than 1,000€ gross per month and 4,422,359 are out of work. This is one of the blogs that has the largest number of hits. I suspect it's for the title which has almost nothing to do with the content. There's a bit about what a Christmassy day the 5th January is 

Bring me pine logs hither Mention of our venerable Christmas tree. in fact we replaced it for this 2023 Christmas

Seasonal snippets All sorts of Christmas things - for once the title is a good reflection of the content

Losing my grip Mainly about a Christmas lottery advert

Rather reassuring The Christmas run up story of years and years ago

Tales of turrón This one doesn't read badly after all this time - obviously enough it's about turrón

Stamping the Christmas cards Just what it says

Underwear, grapes and bubbly New Year's traditions

The goose is getting fat  Those not quite so obvious Christmas things

Drawing to a close  Christmas ends with the Three Kings in Spain

Not a dry eye in the house Christmas concerts and community

Jingle bells  I think it's a bit of a Christmas comparison in two countries

They think it's all over The things that happen in January as part of Christmas. I've even used the title before!

Pale blue dot Christmas lights

Fat chance The Christmas lottery - again

Fattening of geese Christmas cards and British supermarkets

So this is Christmas It seems to be an all embracing article

So this is Christmas

I haven't spent Christmas in the UK for umpteen years, so I may not be as expert on British customs as I think. Nonetheless, unless things have changed drastically, the first tentative signs of Christmas show up in the shops in September. By November the telly is full of Christmas ads full of good cheer, bonhomie and cute robins. Cities, towns and villages start to turn on lights from mid-December and even with online shopping I'm sure that shopping centres, supermarkets and places like restaurants and pubs get busier and busier through December, all building up to the big day. Finally, it's Christmas Day. You do your best to look pleased with the illuminated pullover and the novelty underwear and you console yourself by setting about the mountains of food. Boxing Day you might stay at home to and eat and drink more, or it may be that you have to visit relatives. Maybe, instead, you might thirst for action after so much slouching around and go for a bracing walk or head out to one of those unmissable Boxing Day sales. And that's Christmas really, well the Christmas for those of us who are reasonably financially secure. There's obviously the New Year's Eve stuff to come next week but that's not really Christmas, is it?

Now I've done Spanish Christmases to death in previous blogs but I did think I might be able to do a bit on the organisation and pretend it was something new. Just as I said that I may be wrong about British Christmases I have to remind you that any generalisations I make about Spanish Christmases are generalisations. 

Spaniards have their ways of organising things. That methodology may be better or worse but, usually, it's just different. Think about supermarkets. Being a Briton I might expect the Nutella to be alongside the jam but it isn't, it's with the sweets and chocolate. Think about what you consider to be morning, something that stretches till noon, whereas Spaniards consider that it runs till lunchtime, somewhere around 2pm. Consider how Spaniards often share food in the middle of the table, rather than claiming their own private portions. Consider how there are no continuity announcers on Spanish telly. Nothing but smallish details but things that might surprise someone new to Spain. 

It's a bit the same with Christmas. It starts later in Spain than in the UK, only a bit but definitely later. Even Vigo, where they really go to town on Christmas lights, doesn't switch on till around November 20th. Pundits always say that the starting pistol sounds with the Christmas lottery on the 22nd. Christmas Eve is big, big, big for family eating (I don't mean that literally, there's no turkey equivalent for Spaniards, no default Christmas meal, but it's certainly not family that you eat, no roast brother in law). Christmas Day is another day to eat with the family. Some Spanish families do gift giving on that day but it's still, probably, a minority of families who have Santa delivering gifts on Christmas Eve for Christmas Day. Boxing Day is nothing, well unless you're an Esteban in which case it's your saint's day - like in the song where the snow lays round about, deep and crisp and even. 

New Year's Eve is another family do with eating at home, wearing red underwear, popping twelve grapes and cava drinking all centring around midnight but, in most places, it's a family rather than a public event. That's obviously untrue if you're in the Puerta del Sol, or equivalent, at midnight but, as a general rule, the New Year is seen in at home and, after the campanadas, the older folk sip and nibble on whilst the younger people go out to do a bit of partying. 

But the heart of Christmas, the bit where everyone says "it's really about the children" is still to come. As January 5th and 6th approach the shopping frenzy heightens, the Royal Pages will be out and about collecting the Christmas lists for the Three Kings ready for the gift giving overnight on the 5th. That's the evening for the cabalgatas, the cavalcades, the town centre parades with their sweet throwing kings and elves, with camels, geese, flocks of goats (all of which are to be banned soon, or they may have already been outlawed, on animal cruelty grounds). One of the staples of the journalists in the crowd is to ask the sweet child with the high pitched voice which is their favourite King - The European one, the Asian one or the African one, all with their different coloured hair and beard (and maybe a boot polish face). Somewhere some city will get into the news for having Queens as well as Kings or some sort of politically correct twist to the event. This later Christmas is good if you're old enough to still give Christmas cards because, if you forgot any Spanish chums, handing over a card anytime up to the 5th won't be seen as being late. And the final, dying gasp of Christmas, the big doughnut shaped cakes on the 6th, the Roscón de Reyes. Oh, and of course the other big Christmas lottery del Niño, to add a certain roundness to it all.

After that, just as in the UK, there only remains the sighing on the bathroom scales and the sobbing as you check your card statement.

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And, if you're a glutton for punishment here are the links to several previous Christmas blogs 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2017a

Repurpose, reuse and recycle

I have been trying to think of something to blog about for days. 

I wondered about having a go at Spanish politicians and their inability to agree about anything, ever. It drives me to distraction but it's something to do over a stiff drink, in company, rather than in dodgy prose.

I could have done something on Brexit but my thoughts on islanders lusting for a lost Empire may not have meshed with everyone's so why antagonise people over lost arguments? 

Covid is something we all share. I wondered about tales of border crossings and the differences between Tier 4 in the UK and the situation here. Boring as porridge. Actually, because you may be vaguely interested, apart from the obvious lack of cultural and economic activity our Valencian Community has done remarkably well. There may be curfews and trampling of individual rights but, on a day to day basis the people who still have jobs to go to have been going to them and although the shops, bars, restaurants, cinemas and theatres are well strange places, full of people wearing masks and bathing in hand gel, they are still open. 

Old blog standbys such as language, the cinema and my radio listening have all had recent outings. 

I was left contemplating the void.

Christmas is far from over here though. We're still in holiday mood. The problem is that the things that make up Christmas like concerts, shows, parades, the Royal Pages in the streets etc have virtually all been cancelled (that's a pun!) so there have been no little incidents to use as the stuff of a blog. Being attacked by a flock of geese in the Christmas parade, watching the egg and flour fight in Ibi, seeing the Devil in Caravaca or even the Pinoso Christmas theatre may have given me room to weave an amusing little anecdote but sitting at home with a bottle of scotch and a microwave chicken lasagne doesn't. Even eating a typical Norwegian Christmas Eve meal surrounded by toy Santas and excited dogs isn't the stuff I set out to write about. 

It was worse. When I had a quick scan back through past entries I have done the lottery, prawns, turrón and red underwear so often that I simply couldn't do it again. So I decided to do what the BBC does. 

Repeats it is. Just click the links below.

And some lemons for the prawns

Seasonal Snippets

Rather Reassuring

The Goose is Getting Fat

Jingle Bells

Drawing to a close

Christmas begins

Fat Chance

They think it's all over

Underwear, grapes and bubbly

Interior and exterior lights sweetie

We start in the UK. Back in the 1980s Anglepoise lamps became trendy. Of course they weren't real Anglepoises they were just an accessible Ikea copy. For those of you who missed the last century, or who have never been to Ikea, the real Anglepoise lamp is a balanced-arm lamp design in which the joints and spring tension allow the lamp to be moved into a wide range of positions where it will remain without being clamped in position. It was invented by British designer George Carwardine in 1932. The lamps were enormously successful, particularly the 1227 model.

Shift of scene to Spain. One Sunday in 1964, so the story goes, Luis Pérez Oliva, a designer and Pedro Martín, a scrap dealer, met in the Rastro flea market in Madrid and fell into conversation. As a direct result of that meeting the men formed a company called Fase (the first two letters from Fabricaciones Seriadas or Serial Fabrications in English) to produce desktop lamps. Fase went on to be a big success with their most famous model, the President, bagging a bit role in the Madmen TV series as in the photo here.

Now I knew, vaguely, of the real Anglepoise but I knew nothing of Fase until I heard a piece on the radio. The next week in the same slot on the same programme they talked about Caramelos PEZ or PEZ sweets. To get the idea think tic-tacs but not quite. PEZ is an Austrian brand of sweet sold as a little rectangular lozenge. They come in dinky dispensers which hold 12 sweets. The name, PEZ comes from the first flavour the sweets were available in, peppermint or pfefferminz in German. Eduard Haas began to sell these sweets in 1927 and their original market was smokers who wished to mask the smell of smoke. The little dispenser was cigarette lighter shaped and fitted neatly alongside the packet of fags. Over time the company introduced lots more flavours but, more importantly, they designed hundreds of different novelty dispensers. I think one of the first and most famous had a head of Mickey Mouse. The packaging was designed to attract children to the sweets, like Kinder eggs in reverse. Nowadays there is a flourishing market in collectible dispensers. 

I'd never heard of either of the companies but it's always good to find out things about the place I now live. The radio suggested that these products were well known in Spain but I've always found that what's common knowledge depends on who you talk to. I must say though that recently I've found out something new from almost every extended conversation I've had with someone Spanish. 

I was talking, online, with Susi this morning. I was trying to explain about the British Christmas decorations, both interior and exterior, but especially about exterior lights on houses. This meant that I had to try to explain about where we tend to live in in the UK; about the distribution of housing in cities, towns and the countryside, about town centre gentrification, about where the suburbs begin and so on - the whole nine yards. Have you ever thought how difficult it is to encapsulate the idea of a cottage? Susi, by the way, is not at all anti Christmas but she has no exterior or interior Christmas decorations of any kind in her flat and has never sent or received a Christmas card in her life. She is very young though.

We often think we have shared experiences and that the rich world is pretty standardised, that everything is much of a muchness but, when you get down to the detail, if Spain is anything to go by, the differences are generally unimportant but still quite marked.

Fattening of geese

I know that Christmas cards are a thing of the past. I know that they clutter up all the surfaces not occupied by the Laughing Santa and the Nativity Scene. I know that they are only read once - usually quickly - but I also know that they are homely and nice. A reminder that we still have some friends. Of course, it's a return on investment landscape. To receive cards you have to send cards. I didn't in 2018 and it didn't feel right. Where to get some for this year?

We had a bit of a look around locally. Not very seriously. Actually it was more like a virtual tour - we thought our way around possible local suppliers. We knew of places with hand crafted cards and obviously the Post Office would be selling the UNICEF ones but either option would be a bit pricey for a bulk mailing. If we'd thought harder or started earlier we'd have found somewhere but we didn't and we hadn't. I looked at Amazon but delivery dates were sometimes dodgy and it's difficult to tell how flimsy and even how big the cards are from the on screen photos.

So we drove the 60kms to San Fulgencio. Everyone calls the supermarket Iceland even though the sign outside says Overseas. They are scattered throughout Spain. The last time we shopped in one was probably in 2018 though it may have been 2017. Generally we pop in around this time of year with thoughts fixed on Christmas stuff. When I say Christmas stuff I actually mean Quality Street (or Roses or Celebrations or Heroes). "I'm only going to buy sweets, sauces and chutney, oh and maybe some Stilton, and Bombay Mix," I said, as we got out of the car. 

Hah! I've just finished off a pork pie and we have some Gregg's cheese and onion pasties warming in the oven. As always we fell prey to fondly remembered tastes even though we know that the memory nearly always tastes better.

It's an interesting place is the Overseas Supermarket. There is very little concession to the store being in Spain apart from the prices being in euros. The buyers and sellers are Britons, the music is British Christmas staple, the language is English and the products are "British" too. Usually there is a Spaniard who has learned to love Robertson's jam, Princes Corned Beef or Gray Dunn Caramel Wafers but today it was just us, just Britons. Even the public information announcements, which punctuated the in-store music, about wearing face coverings and keeping your distance, were from England.

Right then now for an Army & Navy sweet and maybe then I'll start writing cards.

Fat chance

As usual we won nothing. Twitter was alive with complaints about the state broadcaster's presenters talking over the numbers and full of praise for the coverage on the commercial channel la Sexta. On the telly the little girl who called the winning number was joyfully sobbing her eyes out whilst her mother, in the stalls of the same theatre, grinned all over her face. In Almansa, in the hairdresser's where the owner had handed out fractions of the ticket to her regulars, they were celebrating, in the old people's home where nearly everyone had won a woman said she was going to go and find a boyfriend and all over Spain people popped the corks on sparkling wine, toasted their good luck and danced for the TV cameras.  The usual crop of Christmas Lottery stories.

The first event of the Spanish Christmas, el Gordo, the one that hands out lots and lots of money in relatively small packages all over Spain has come and gone.

I thought I couldn't do yet another blog about the lottery until I had a look back at the December posts. All I could find are the entries from 2007  and 2006. The draw does get a mention in other years but only as a partial entry amongst talk of mince pies and polvorones. It would have been a good thing to write about but it's just after eleven in the evening now. We went out to Murcia and, to be honest, I don't feel like writing a full entry from scratch.

The 2007 post though is still pretty accurate. The boys and girls from San Ildefonso school, who sing the numbers and prizes, have different uniforms and the top prize is now 400,000€ or 323,000€ (I think) after tax but the lottery hasn't changed that much in 11 years.

I was thinking about what I'd do with my winnings just before I got up this morning. Pretty basic stuff, a new motor, a bit of driving around Spain and probably back to Cartagena. Not a sausage though, as I said. I suppose I could buy a ticket for el Niño in January. Different but similar. Still enough for a new car.

Pale blue dot

Shortest day of the year, ages old festival. Rural Spain smells of wood smoke from the open fires and wood burners. Burning things is big here. Valencianos have a reputation for fireworks. The Fallas festivals in Valencia are about burning the old as the new life of Spring appears. There are bonfires at San Juan for the longest day of the year and bonfires in Santa Catalina just a couple of weeks ago, maybe full of symbolism, but also good for cooking sausage.

Back in the UK, when we lived there, one of our Christmas treats was to do a bit of a tour around those houses, beloved of the electricity generators, covered in myriad light bulbs. The light to chase away the darkness. I'm not sure how that plays any more. LEDs mean less power but the UK seems to be quite puritan, quite serious, from the odd titbits I hear. There's probably something bad about lighting up your house. If  the principal talking point of a 1977 video of John Noakes climbing up Nelson's Column is the scant regard for Health and Safety then it's probably basically wrong to bedeck your house with lights.

Here in Pinoso they turned on the town's Christmas lights on Thursday, on Constitution Day. The nativity scene was opened up too and there was singing opposite the church. We got cake and hot chocolate down where they set off the fireworks near the municipal tree - though of course it's not a tree it's one of those soulless traffic cone LED things. Good lights though and the weather has been lovely so the turnout was good.

Time to get cracking on joining in. We've had a star - guiding the three wise men, the magic kings - to the West on the front of the house for years now with a long sparkling tail. This year I've added another rope light, a curtain of twinkling LEDs and a light up reindeer on the garage roof. Not much by some standards but it took me ages to drill all those new holes for all those new hooks.

And this year we have company too. Generally Spaniards aren't big on lights in their homes. The countryside is not peppered with decorated homes. Our next door neighbour never bothers but there are new Brits a couple of doors up and they have strung some lights along the front of their roofline. Our homes shine, as beacons of foreignness, into the night sky warding off the evil spirits of the approaching winter solstice.

They think it's all over

I spoke to my mum on the phone today. She said that she'd had a good Christmas and New Year but that she was glad to be back to normal. Later I popped in to town. I went to a cake shop that I've only ever been in once before, that time it was to order a birthday cake for Maggie, one with icing and a message and candles. This time it was to order a roscón. I can't remember whether I ordered the custard filling (crema) or the cream filling (nata) but either way I'm expecting better quality than the ones we usually buy from the supermarket. The last time we bought a baker's shop roscón was when we lived it Cartagena. I have a vague and nagging memory that I was shocked at the price then but, hey-ho, Christmas tradition and all that. The sensible eating can start when Christmas is over after the 6th.

I've written about Roscones before, the traditional Roscón de Reyes cake, a bit like a big doughnut that gets eaten on Kings, at Epiphany, on 6th January when the Three Wise Men have delivered the presents to the baby Jesus and to all the good boys and girls. The bad ones get coal so the Kings are obviously more generous than Santa who leaves nothing for bad children!

As I passed the lottery shop I did something else I don't usually do. I went in and bought a lottery ticket for el Niño draw, the Child, the second Christmas lottery. The prizes for el Niño are less than for el Gordo Christmas draw on 22nd December but, I think, there's a better chance of winning the big prize and excellent chances of, at least, getting your money back (1:3). I read that the chances of winning the 200,000€ top prize are something like 1:100,000 which is about the same as the chance of being stung to death by a bee or poisoned to death by a snake. They had a number that had obviously been spurned by Pinoseros in general, there was a caricature promoting the number, it was parodied as el Feo, the Ugly. Obviously enough that's the number I bought.

So, if the roscón does turn out to be really expensive when I pick it up on the 5th I can always hope that just getting the 20€ ticket money back from the draw on the 6th will at least pay for it. Or I can hope that the fine taste of the "home baked" version will be enough to make me forget this last gasp Christmas spending.

Without news

I've just been scanning through a number of other English language blogs looking for inspiration. It's time to write a blog entry and I can't think of anything to write about.

I could do New Year of course but I must have done cava (which is not, by the way, pronounced carver - but more like kavva), red underwear and the twelve grapes about as many years as I've lived here. I've already done a bit of a Christmas piece so I can't do that again even though it's still in full swing with the shopping centres clogged with cars and the telly full of perfume adverts. It's still a week to Kings and I've done Kings so many times that regular readers must be able to imagine what a Roscón tastes like. We haven't done many non British Christmas events but, even if we had, there's not a lot of mileage in living nativity scenes, carol concerts or Christmas story telling. I didn't get caught by any jokes yesterday on "Day of the Innocents" (think of it as Spanish April 1st) nor did I make the well trodden journey to see the egg, flour, fire extinguisher and firework fight in Ibi. 

I wondered if I could do something on the Valenciano language or yet another entry on speaking, or not speaking, Spanish. The thought came to me when I remembered the bit of a language triumph I had in the KFC in Elche the other day dealing with the bastardised Spanish pronunciation of isolated English words. I didn't hesitate once in the twenty question interrogation that is now the routine for ordering the simplest thing from the Good Colonel. Then I remembered that, only a few moments before, it had been exactly the opposite in asking for tickets for Wonder Wheel (the latest and shockingly boring Woody Allen) when I had to resort to mispronouncing the old man's name - Gwuddy Al-in - because my versions of gwanda weal, wander weyl and anything else, all the way back to a well modulated English pronunciation of Wonder Wheel, just left the ticket seller looking blank. I'm still a long way from writing that handy little booklet - "How to pronounce English words like a Spaniard."

The weather is always a good mainstay - Spain has had its second borrasca, or big storm, over the last few days since the new naming regime came into being. Storms of a certain intensity, it seems, now get named alphabetically - like hurricanes. This one was Bruno, we had Ana a while ago. It killed a couple of people across Spain and the snow and coastal storms looked really impressive on the telly. Here in sunny Culebrón though the worst that happened was that I had to get out of bed at 6.25am to secure a few things because the wind was blowing pots and chairs around. Hardly the stuff of a riveting blog.

Something with the students then or something from the news, the television, the radio; a second hand tale? My bosses have a Christmas play-scheme so they've laid me off for a couple of weeks leaving me with no students to talk to. No students, no stories. At home, with it being Christmas, the British TV companies have spent lots of money and Maggie has been watching their special offerings. Nothing there then either. Without the structure of work the routine has gone out of the window so I've not been keeping up with the news as well as usual. Anyway half the journalists are taking a few days off. And in Cataluña, which has more or less monopolised the news for months, it's all very quiet because all the politicians are horse trading, some of them via Skype, after the inconclusive elections. No blog fodder.

No. Another lifetime ago, I was in Saudi Arabia one Christmas. Lots of people I worked with went back to the UK to eat turkey and snooze on the sofa and, when they got back to Wadi Al-Batin, we asked for their Christmas reports. They were like José Moscardó, the bloke in charge of the fascist defence of the Alcázar in Toledo during the Spanish Civil War. The fortress was under siege, Franco sent troops to relieve it and, when they got there the siege was lifted. Moscardó was asked for his report. He said "Nothing new in the Alcázar." I know the feeling.  Nothing new in Culebrón.

Jingle bells

There's an advert on the telly at the moment for el Corte Inglés, the big Spanish department store, which uses lots of Christmassy images. There are turkeys, there are Christmas trees, there are Santa Claus hats and there's lots of snow. Well I think of them as Christmassy images but that may not be the same for lots and lots of Spaniards.

I can only generalise here but I think that Christmas is an incredibly important time for Britons. Even if it isn't, in fact, much more than a couple of days of family arguments, overeating and snoozing in front of the telly the build up to it, the folklore around it, the customs associated with it, are deeply entrenched in British culture. Put a picture of a robin, in the snow, on the front of a greetings card and it's a Christmas card and Christmas cards are one of the symbols, the rites, of Christmas even if you're going to do it all on Facebook this year. Although Britons eat chocolates all year round most British houses don't have tins of Quality Street and the like except at Christmas time. You may be vegan, you may be going to have Indian food this year, but, if I were to ask Britons what the traditional Christmas lunch consists of, the answer would be turkey with all the trimmings. Holly, mistletoe, houses lit up with lights, the works do, Salvation Army bands, carol concerts, Christmas trees and all the rest are obvious and persistent Christmas symbols.

As we approach Christmas I usually do a bit of English language Christmas vocabulary with my students through songs, stories or quizzes. I wouldn't expect them to know mince pies just as I wouldn't expect most Britons to know about traditional Spanish fare like turrón, mantecados or polvorones. But I'm always surprised when I ask students what colour Santa's clothes are and the answer doesn't appear to be obvious to them. I find it strange that I need to explain that Papá Noel - which is the most common name for Santa here and which I presume comes from the French - is also known as Father Christmas or Santa Claus or Santa. Surely, just like me, they have seen hundreds of soppy Hollywood films loaded with this imagery? I never understand why the question about which animal pulls Santa's sleigh, or what a sleigh is, are more problematic than simply knowing the vocabulary for reno (reindeer) or trineo (sleigh). Explain as I might that the sound that a bell makes is called jingling there is no link, for the majority of Spaniards that I've ever taught, between bells, jingling or not, and Christmas. Even the Christian type questions - why was Jesus born in a stable?, what did the Wise Men follow? - don't seem to have the pat responses learned from an arsenal of memorised Christmas songs.

Some things are the same in both countries, for instance most towns have Christmas lights in their main streets and families get together to eat. Other things are completely different in Spain to the UK but equally widespread. For example nearly all the Spanish bars have raffles for Christmas baskets loaded with food and drink and the big Christmas lottery moves millions of euros. Other things are variations on a similar theme. Santa isn't particularly Spanish for instance, he's a recentish import, but the Spanish do have gift givers, the Three Kings, (Three Wise Men to you and me) and they turn up to hand over their gifts on the evening of the 5th January in big parades the length and breadth of Spain.

As an outsider, an outsider who has seen a lot of Spanish Christmases now, I'd say that there are plenty of Christmassy Spanish things but that they are nowhere near as standardised as they are in the UK. Ask Spaniards what they are going to have for Christmas lunch and the answer will vary from suckling pig or lamb to sea bream and local dishes such as pine nut flavoured meat balls. Putting up the Nativity Scene is a big thing in some Spanish homes and in others it's simply another little seasonal routine. Plenty of houses have trees and many have lights too but if your Christmas house is no lighter and just as treeless as at any other time of the year then nobody would see that as being bah, humbug! In fact, so far as I know, there are no literary equivalents to that Dickensian story. Gift giving, gift exchanging, is nowhere near as widespread here as it is in the UK and if there are Secret Santa type things at work I've never come across them. The expectations of Spanish children for Christmas gifts seem to be far less demanding than their British peers. On the couple of occasions that someone has given me a Christmas gift, associated with my teaching, I've been really surprised. Charitable organisations, like the Red Cross, do produce Christmas cards and, if you know where to look, you can buy them. One year, when Corte Inglés didn't have any cards and I couldn't afford the UNICEF ones at the Post Office, I had the bright spark idea of going to the local office of the Red Cross to buy some. I kept about half a dozen bemused people mildly amused for about five minutes as I tried, in my variation of Spanish, to explain why I might want to buy Christmas cards as a way of donating to their organisation.

Finally, and almost incomprehensibly for most of the Britons I know, Christmas isn't really celebrated at the same time. For Spaniards the evening of Christmas Eve is big - the family gets together and eats. Christmas Day is Christmas Day and the family gets together and eats. The 26th is non event - Boxing Day is only the very routine St Stephen's Day. New Year's Eve is New Year's Eve with grapes and underwear and fizzy wine. Probably the liveliest day of Christmas is the evening of the 5th January when the Three Magic Kings deliver their gifts. The parades and the last minute shopping frenzy give it a feel very similar to Christmas Eve for we Anglos.

Not a dry eye in the house

I was sitting beside an emergency exit, near the stairs to backstage. There was coming and going all the time. Babies were crying, a little girl sitting with her grandad to my left seemed to be practising crossing herself, mobile phones were alight everywhere to video the son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter maybe even the uncle or grandma doing his or her bit. The woman behind me suddenly burst into annoying conversation but I forgave her when a few minutes later she cursed slightly before going on stage to the accolade of the crowd as one of the moving forces behind the event - pre-show nerves I suppose. I was sitting next to a bloke who owns a bar I go in from time to time and I think the singer who sat in front of me when she was done performing was the woman who runs the tobacconist. Everywhere there were pristine frocks, new shoes and shirts with the creases still in them from the packets. I recognised tens of people in the audience or onstage. There were false starts with the same, wrong, music for three different performances and the number of times mics weren't on when they should be or had to be moved, adjusted and adjusted again was legion. The attempts to find the join in the curtains was very Morecambe and Wise. At times the singing left something to be desired but, what it lacked in professionalism, it more than made up for in heart.

But that's what you'd expect from a small town Christmas concert. Proceeds to a local Alzheimer group. I think nearly all of the musical groups from the town were there and both of the primary schools too with their music teachers just hoping that this time it would go as it should.

I used to work for an organisation that had community in its title. If I am ever required to say what I used to do in the UK I talk about work with communities but what was happening around me this evening, in the Teatro Auditorio Emilio Martinez Sáez, in Pinoso, was about as community as community can be. And as the Mayor said, as he did his little bit of wind up at the end, we have a pretty nice little town - a town that does well at being safe yet lively, good at looking after and supporting its people. It was almost like an advert for Christmas - very good will and peace on Earth.

Lovely

Just a bunch of assorted trivia that has tickled my fancy in the last couple of days.

There are a lot of stars in Culebròn. That's probably an incorrect assertion. I suppose there are exactly the same number of stars as there are anywhere but lots of them are easy to see from Culebrón because we get lots of cloudless night skies and there's very little light pollution. That's not quite true either because, at the moment, we have a dazzling Christmas light display which, for the very first time this year, features a spiral of LED rope around the palm tree. The Geminids meteorite shower was flashing across the sky all last night though in an even more dazzling display. Lovely.

We went to the flicks yesterday evening, we often do. We'd been to visit someone and we were a little late away; we went the long way around so we arrived at the cinema a few minutes after the advertised start time. The cinema we often use shows the sort of pictures that don't always attract a lot of advertising. So, sometimes, if the start time is 6.15 the film actually starts at 6.15 but, then again, if it's a bit more Hollywood, the 6.15 film might not start till 6.30 after the trailers and ads. Whilst Maggie waited to buy the tickets I went to have a look at the monitors to see if the film had begun. If it had we had a second choice. The manager, who was on ticket collection, said hello, lots of the staff greet us by name nowadays, and asked me which film we wanted to see. I told him. It was due to start 10 minutes ago he said, but there's nobody in there so I'll start it when you're ready. A private showing and to our timetable. Lovely.

Bad keepers that we are we'd missed the annual update of the vaccinations for the house cats. I took them both in today. I was amazed - apart from the chief vet everyone that I saw in the vet's surgery/office is doing or has done at least a couple of English classes with me. Of course I shouldn't be driving but I thought the 5kms in to town wouldn't hurt. As I drove Bea home she had a bit of an accident, bowel wise. She's not a big fan of car travel. At the exact moment that the stench of her reaction assailed my nostrils the very obvious yellow van of the bloke who looks after my motor went the other way. He flashed his lights in greeting. I would have waved back but a bit of chrome trim chose that exact moment to fly off the front of the car and bounce off the windscreen. I went back to get it later, on the bike, and fastened it back on to the car with duct tape as a temporary repair. Lovely.

And finally, yesterday, we passed the bodega/almazara in Culebrón. There were a stack of cars and vans queuing to hand over their olive crops to be pressed into oil by the almazara, the oil mill. The bodega, the winery, did its stuff back around September time. So I strolled over with the camera to take some snaps. I have no idea what the process was but I liked the small scale nature of it. Little trailers full of olives, plastic bags full of olives, people standing around and chatting waiting to have their crops weighed in. The cars are obviously modern enough but the process is probably as old as the hills. Lovely.

Roast saddle of venison, tortilla and beans

I'm not much of a cook though I can usually produce something that is, at least, edible. That's not always the case; new recipes tend to turn out badly and, recently, I have had a series of culinary disasters. I did some beef, tomato and olive thing that tasted of salt and nothing else. There was another concoction that I ended up tipping directly into the bin, something with lots of cream and garlic. I'm safer when I cook up the lentils or one of the student favourites (well favourite with the one time students who are now beginning to draw their pensions or die) like spag bol and chilli con carne. Nonetheless my version of kebabs with chorizo is OK and that spaghetti with yoghurt and mushrooms and bacon isn't bad either. My shepherd's pie's perfectly tasty and there are plenty more in my repertoire that, whilst they may not exactly thrill the palette, do, at least, maintain the calorie input without hardship.

The stuff that goes into my meals comes from the shops in the form of veg and pulses and meat and cheese and eggs and stuff like that. The food may come in packets and boxes. It may have been grown under hectares of plastic, sprayed with hideous chemicals, never have felt the soil on its roots or the sun on its seed-pod but it still looks like a carrot, a lettuce or a chickpea. If it's an animal product then I wouldn't like to speculate as to whether the beast spent it's life confined in a tiny feeding station eating high protein feed made from fracked oil or recycled fish. Nonetheless, basically, whatever the food and however it got produced, it would still be recognisable as food to my forebears. The raw material of a meal rather than the finished product.

There have been prepared foods in Spanish supermarket freezers as long as I have lived here and somebody must buy them because they are still on sale. In fact I've noticed that much of the extra space in the newer larger store of a local supermarket has been taken up by new lines of pre-prepared stuff. I still don't see a lot of people buying it though. Usually the stuff on the supermarket belt in front of mine looks much like my stuff except that they have always remembered something that I've forgotten. I think it would be fair to say that most of the Spaniards around here do not buy things that come ready prepared. It's a sweeping generalisation and there are plenty of exceptions from pizzas to ready shaped meatballs. It may well be different in the bigger cities too but I think that most people in most homes still cook their food from scratch rather than heat up something they have bought.

Now I saw an advert on Spanish TV today for C&A. It's the first ad that I've noticed with a Christmas theme. This reminded me that we'll be due our annual trip to the coast to the Overseas Supermarket/Iceland store. It's not that I often wake up thinking of Piccalilli and Bombay mix or Melton Mowbray pies and Quality Street but, confronted with shelves full of products that were staples with me for forty years, there is always lot of gratuitous overspending. We usually go to buy something specific that's either expensive or unavailable locally - gammon, pork and mustard sausages, twiglets - but we nearly always end up buying lots of things that sound great but turn out to be soggy, tasteless or otherwise disappointing. This year I really must remember to say no to the pre-prepared stuff however good the photo on the box looks.

By the way I apologise if I've done this blog before. Checking the blog is a bit like watching the photos, my own photos, that pop up randomly on my laptop as a screen saver. I sometimes find myself watching the slide-show of half remembered photos and thinking that some of them aren't so bad. Then one of the many blurred pictures pops up and my hubris evaporates. When I thought of blogging on pre-prepared versus fresh food I popped some search clues into the blog and I found myself re-reading long forgotten blog posts, sometimes from years ago. I thought they were OK until I bumped into two in a row which were the literary equivalent of those blurred snaps. I gave up, ashamed of my prose and the out of date information. Mind you if I've forgotten the chances are that you have too.

Drawing to a close

As I remember it, In England, Christmas gets off the ground just after the schools start back in September. Nothing frantic but there are unmistakable signs. Displays of trees in John Lewis, re-organisation of the display stands in Clinton's cards. It builds to a crescendo as the 25th approaches. Then a couple of family meals, too much drink, some tedious board games, the DFS 9am Boxing Day Sale and, although you may still be off work, Christmas is over.

In Spain it's different. My sister tells me that in Tenerife there was Christmas all over the place in November but, generally, in most places in Spain, you could miss any signs until December is well under way. Here in Pinoso, for instance, the Christmas lights weren't turned on till the 10th of December. Schools break up a couple of days before Christmas Eve. Families get together on the 24th and 25th echoing that yo-yoing between his and her families of Christmas day and Boxing day in the UK on alternate years. I know, by the way, that times have changed and that not all families are his and hers and that not everyone, even in Western Europe, celebrates Christmas but you'll just have to play along with me here. It is my blog after all.

But Christmas isn't over here. New Year's is also very much part of Christmas and people will be wishing you Felices Fiestas or Feliz Navidad until it becomes Feliz Año (Happy New Year). Then it, sort of, goes back to being Christmas. In fact it builds to a crescendo because, if Christmas really is about the children, then today and tomorrow are the big days.

The pages (servant pages, not pieces of paper pages) have been out all over the country collecting the letters from good boys and girls for the The Three Kings or, as we tend to say, the Three Wise Men. The Kings are the gift givers, working overnight on the 5th January, in much the same way as Father Christmas brought me that orange bulldozer. The Kings as present deliverers has a certain biblical logic given that they turned up in Bethlehem with gold, frankincense and myrrh. In about an hour, they will be parading through city streets all over Spain.

I'm racing with the post a bit. We're staying local this time and going to the cabalgata, the cavalcade, on home turf, in Pinoso. We'd wondered about going to Alcoi (the oldest parade in Spain where the Kings ride in the "wrong" order and where the King's helpers carry ladders to scale balconies to leave presents) or to Elche or Murcia, where the parades are a bit grander, but no. Local it is.

On the telly none of the reporters give the game away. The myth is maintained by hard bitten journalists who explain that the reason there are so many Kings in so many places is because of their magic powers. Children with squeaky voices are interviewed about their gift choices - I want a Nancy, I want a hatchimal - or reading out their wishes that none of the children of the world go hungry. Later tonight on the TV news there will be reports of Kings in helicopters, in boats, on elephants. The shops are still open for those last minute gifts and they will be in Madrid, Barcelona and the like till 10 this evening.

You think it's all over. Well not quite yet.

The goose is getting fat

I heard something on the radio this morning about a charity, that had been collecting toys for poorer children. The charity had been robbed and the toys stolen. The radio interviewer was sympathetic. "And just two weeks away from handing over the toys." he said.

Now I know that the traditional day for gift giving in Spain isn't until January 6th. Nonetheless it struck me that the interviewer took no account of Santa doing his rounds. Every year, at Christmas time, for years now, I have been teaching English to Spaniards. I tell my students that we eat turkey, I know not all of us do, vegans and vegetarians don't and probably a whole bundle of other people for ethical or religious reasons, but we do. That's me, my family, most of the people I know. We have turkey, we play Monopoly or Scrabble, we eat mince pies and ignore all but one of those "Eat Me" dates which may or may not still exist. James Bond films, the only time of the year when we eat nuts by breaking them free from shells - add whatever you like - those things that make Christmas Christmas.

I ask Spaniards for their equivalents but there seem to be none. Most of my students say they eat sea food but the main course can be anything from lamb to sea bass. If we have Christmas pudding and mince pies they can counter with mantecados, polvorones and especially turrón but there seems to be much less of the shared ritual. Miracle on 34th street, It's a Wonderful Life and Love Actually may well be on the telly but there is no folk history to them. There are plenty of carols but the litany of awful Christmas songs that get dusted off each year isn't anything like the same; there are no home grown versions of Slade and Wizard but neither do spacemen come travelling nor cavalry get halted. The Christmas "classics" like White Christmas and Winter Wonderland are virtually unknown. Santa Claus is now a Christmas personality in Spain but the link to Saint Nicholas is far too tenuous for most of my students. Whilst the French Papa Noël is a well known character, to most Spaniards, his Anglo alter ego, Father Christmas, is not.

This year Christmas day falls on Sunday. As that is a non working day there is no need for it to be a declared as a day not to work. Most regions have decided to make the Monday, the 26th, which has no significance for Spaniards whatsoever, a holiday. Nonetheless I'm sure that there will be lots of Spanish workers who finish work on Friday evening and go back to work on Monday morning without feeling particularly hard done by. Over the weekend they will have eaten and drunk much more than usual, almost certainly with their families, but they aren't being denied anything particularly special. It's just another of the potential non working days that fell on a Sunday. On top of that Christmas is still far from over. New Year and especially Reyes Magos, Three Kings, the principal gift giving time is still to come.

In the streets there are no Salvation Army bands and no carol singers. As I drive to and from work I don't pass houses ablaze with Christmas lights. The school I work in was not buzzing with children handing over gifts to their teachers as term ended. My bosses at one of my workplaces gave me a really nice gift pack with wine and local foods but no other Spanish person I work with has given me a card or handed out the mince pies or roped me in to the Secret Santa circle. There has been no works do and the crackers and hats that go with a do are unknown.

I would not claim that I know how Christmas works for most Spaniards but that's not to say that I don't know a fair bit about the detail of how Christmas is celebrated here. It would be utterly wrong to suggest that Christmas is not an important landmark in the Spanish calendar or that it is not a huge driver of consumer spending but it is not a holiday, nor a time of year, that has the resonance with Spaniards that it has for Britons.

Happy Christmas.

Underwear, grapes and bubbly

I missed out on the red underwear last night. I forgot all about it. Blue and grey I think. And when I was looking for some background on the underwear I came across another New Year's tradition that I didn't know about. It makes sense though and ties in with a famous Christmas TV ad. And, of course, the grapes, the grapes.

Anne Igartiburu and Ramón García were last nights presenters as the camera focused on the clock tower of the 18th-century Real Casa de Correos in Madrid's Puerta del Sol. Numbers in the square were limited for the first time ever. Just 25,000 people. The ball in the tower slides down, the clock begins with the quarter chimes - not yet, not yet — a pause then the twelve chimes. On each chime we have to pop a grape into our mouth. One for each month of the year. The grapes have pips. The grapes, well nearly all of them, come from near us from the valley of the Vinalopó. Eat them all before the bell tolls fade away and you will have good luck for the year.

The story goes that the tradition of the grapes is a marketing ploy invented by the wily grape growers of Alicante after they had a bumper harvest about a century ago. There are other stories that tie the tradition to rich people from Madrid copying a French fad. Whatever the origins the lucky grapes - las uvas de la suerte - are now as symbolic of New Year as Auld Lang Syne is to Britons.

The typical grapes are white Aledo grapes which are harvested in late November and December. They are protected by Denominación de Origen or D.O. status which means that there are specific rules about how the grapes can be grown and harvested. When buds first form in June and July they are wrapped in paper bags and kept covered as they ripen. Originally this was done to keep off a plague of moths but nowadays the growers say it maintains the flavour and concentrates the aroma of the grapes as well as slowing down their maturation.

We had proper grapes this year because we were in a restaurant and they supplied them but sometimes, when we've not been sure where we are going to end up at midnight we have taken the precaution of buying a small can of ready peeled, de-pipped grapes so that we are ready when the time comes.

We should have been wearing red underwear too and to do it right the underwear should have been given by someone else. I've heard it said that this is a general good luck charm and that the tradition started because red was such a vibrant life affirming colour. Nowadays it's often associated with good luck in love. I'd have thought that might have had more to do with underwear being removed.

Grapes for general luck, underwear for luck in love and gold for luck in things financial. After eating the grapes, Spaniards, and Britons in Spanish company, generally drink cava, the sparkling wine most of which is produced in Catalunya. Apparently we should drop something gold into the glass of bubbly, drink the entire glassful in one go and retrieve the gold to assure our financial success in the coming year. The Freixenet Cava telly ad always features lots of gold

We didn't get a cotillón in the restaurant. A cotillón is a a fun bag with party poppers, paper hats and suchlike. I only mention it here because I was amused by the name for the thing that has a curled tube of paper that flicks out and screeches when you blow into the mouthpiece. I don't know if we have a consistent name for them in English as my Googling produced party horn, screamer, tweeter, squeaker and noise-maker but in peninsular Spanish they are called matasuegras - mother in law killers. Ho, Ho.

Happy New Year.

Stamping the Christmas cards

I went to the Post Office to buy some stamps for my Christmas cards but there was a big queue. Now it can take fifteen minutes for Enrique, the guy on the Post Office counter, to shift two people so five or six people and I thought maybe I should carry food. Alternatively I could go to a tobacconist and buy the stamps there. I chose the second option.

In Spain there is a price for normal mail and a different price for what must be classed as abnormal mail. I mentioned this to the woman selling me the stamps in the tobacconist. She thought it was so much nonsense and limited herself to selling me stamps at 42c for national delivery and 90c for stuff to the rest of Europe. The other side of the world cost just 10c more.

I wrote my cards but before I stuck on the stamps I checked what constituted normal and abnormal mail. The price differential was substantial and most of my cards were definitely abnormal. Being an honest sort of bloke I thought the best bet was to explain myself to Enrique and use my tobacconist stamps plus extras from the Post Office to make up the difference. All I had to do was to find a time when the Post Office was empty.

Being old and stupid I forgot to take the stamps with me when I went in to the Post Office very early one morning so I ended up buying all the stamps there.

Maggie was writing her cards after I'd done mine. I offered her my unused stamps. She wrote her cards and started sticking stamps. She asked me about a stamp for sending a card within Spain. It was then I realised that she had put the national stamps on all the internationally addressed cards.

She hadn't recognised the Christmas tree design in the photo above as a sheet of six stamps. "I thought it was more useless Christmas information you'd brought home," she said. I laughed like a drain.

No typical

When I went to the pictures yesterday, and today come to that, the shopping centre in Petrer, where the multiplex is, was heaving. This is unusual. There aren't many shops in the shopping centre and I've always presumed that it's one of those that got it wrong. But not today, or yesterday.

I like this particular cinema because the staff are friendly and because it's not busy. Unlike all the other cinemas, which only show Hollywood, Spanish or worldwide hits, this cinema shows anything they can get hold of. One of the reasons being that in a few of the screens they still had film projectors so they were still showing film or, as a half way measure, they showed Blu Ray stuff. It's not exactly arts cinema, and all of it is dubbed, but I've seen some really offbeat stuff. They have just digitalized the last few screens so I suppose that will change.

The reason for this heavingosity in the car park, the hordes of shoppers in the centre and the queues in the cinema was Black Friday. Until last year I had never even heard of Black Friday.

On Halloween we were in Jumilla to go to the theatre. As we hit the pre theatre tapas there were hundreds of children dressed as witches, spidermen and vampires being shepherded from doorbell to doorbell shouting truco o trato a semi translation of trick or treat. Halloween is definitely gaining ground.

Over a week ago we were doing a big supermarket shop. The in store tannoy system was urging us to put in our order for our festive meat. The Christmas lottery advert is on the telly, there are adverts with snow, the Chinese shops have Christmas trees, the turrón table is out at the local fruit and nut co-op. The Christmas campaigns have started. Until very recently nothing Christmassy happened till December 1st at the earliest.

I haven't seen anything three wheeled or pulled by a donkey or mule for a while. They use contactless technology for the credit card at the petrol station and lots of things that I have complained about having to do in person during the life of this blog can now be done on the Internet. Spain has become much more like everywhere else really quickly recently.

Tales of turrón

Turrón is made from almonds, honey, egg whites and sugar. It's an Alicante speciality which is now produced all over Spain. Turrón, has no specific English equivalent, though for shorthand I often describe it as nougat. It's not much like the pink and white chewy nougat I knew as a youngster though. Turrón is associated with the town of Jijona which is about 70 km up the road from us. I wrote about it ages ago in a blog.

So we were going back to the UK for Christmas. I'd made a pact with my family about not exchanging gifts. We did, nonetheless, take a few Spanish Christmas goodies - mantecados, polvorones and of course turrón. I'd forgotten that I hadn't made the same pact with Maggie's family who showered me with expensive gifts whilst I had neither socks nor bubble bath in trade - it was terribly embarrassing.

The make of turrón that Maggie bought was called Pico which is a good quality if everyday brand - she bought the hard stuff and the soft one. It's maybe a bit less than half the price of the best brands which can cost as much as 9€ for a 300g bar. It was traditional enough though for me to notice something that I've missed in ten years of wolfing it down. I realised they had different names. The crunchy stuff was called Turrón de Alicante and the sort that oozes almond oil was Turrón de Jijona. Nowadays there are tens of flavours of "turrón" most of which have nothing to do with the original concept. So we have chocolate flavour, milk flavour, crema catalana flavour, strawberry flavour etcetera - the list is nearly endless. It was seeing the two traditional types side by side in matcing packets that made me realise the simple difference.

For some now forgotten reason turrón came up in the conversation with our builders. They sang the praises of a turrón produced by a local factory which processes nuts. It's obvious enough when you think about it. They work with almonds, there is lots of local honey and chickens live everywhere so the raw materials were to hand.

Intrigued I bought some when I went to pick up a gas cylinder (excellent isn't it? - nuts and butane in the same shop) and I notice that it has the quality mark to say that it's made to the standards of some regulatory body. That was news to me too and it explains why some of the most famous brands are made in places like Santander and Gijón which are miles from Alicante.

The trouble is I can't eat it. I gained two and a half kilos in the four days in the UK. It's time for penance - the hair shirt and flagellation of portion control. Mind you Christmas is far from over in Spain and just a little each day couldn't do much harm could it?

A spaceman went visiting

I think it started with the chappie on passport control at Stansted. The notices around him requested that we please do this or that. No use of the imperative. No demands. He said hello. I greeted him back. The rest of the exchange was equally pleasant. Maggie and I were in England for a few days over Christmas and the welcome at the border was a change from my last couple of experiences and a good start to our trip.

I don't go to the UK that often and when I do I find myself noticing it much more than I did when I lived there. For instance, when we were staying with Maggie's family in Bedford I went for a stroll around the area they live. Lots of well established family homes, normal, average sort of homes built anytime between maybe the 1930s and the present. I took snaps; I found them intriguing. I'm sure the people who saw me wondered what I was doing and why. One chap even asked me. He'd been in his home since 1955 when it was a new build. 

In England people were generally very nice to me. A lot of my conversation with strangers has been in commercial premises. I thought I noticed a very direct approach. It struck me as an egalitarian approach; an exchange between equals  Sometimes in a queue or at a bar I also appreciated the very clear instructions or requests that preceded those exchanges. Some of it may well have been scripted by the HR department but I have no complaints about their work. Good English and a good approach I thought.

I really do notice the language. I often turn as I hear someone speaking English. I listen for new phrases, new idioms. I felt to do OK in the few conversations I had. I'm always slightly concerned when I go back that I'll sound like some Dickensian character speaking an archaic form of English mired in the past. There were a few minor blips but I thought everything was fine.

It was cold. It didn't look cold from behind the double or triple glazing in the kitchen with the central heating doing its stuff. The robins, magpies, tits, finches, spuggies and other birds that I recognised on the bird feeders which festooned the gardens of both houses we stayed in looked warm enough. In fact wearing a couple of layers of coats, gloves, a scarf and thick socks it didn't even feel cold outdoors for the first ten minutes but then the heat would seep through those socks and out of my feet. After twenty minutes my ears had crisped up and my runny nose was red. I could feel the blood vessels in my cheeks bursting. England is decidedly cooler than Spain.

It's a different colour too. At least where we've been in Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire it's a sort of muddy brown with green splodges and a leaden grey sky. To be fair though on Christmas Day and part of Christmas Eve it was cold, crisp and clear till it got dark - dark at four for pity's sake!. That lack of light was so depressing. There was a mournful sound that seemed to go with the flat even lighting. I'd never really thought of it before but it's a sound instantly associated with so many British winters. It's the call that crows make from the sharp edged, leafless winter trees.

The last time I was in the UK for Christmas was about ten years ago. If my memory serves there are now fewer Christmas trees in windows than there were then. The lights on houses were lovely though with the LEDs sparkling away outside countless houses. Light fighting back against the darkness as it were - very poetic. Spain would be better with more private lights in my opinion.

We got vegan food in one of the three houses we visited. Vegan is hardly traditional fare but, even then, surrounded by Christmas crackers and Santa shaped salt shakers the meal ws not only tasty but it felt traditional enough. Food in the other two houses followed well trodden paths - mulled wine, turkey, sprouts, mince pies Christmas cake or Marks and Sparks nibbles. Brilliant - comfortable, time honoured food. Nonetheless I noticed the variations in the food cupboard as I searched for Branston to put on my wholemeal breakfast toast. Decaff tea seemed so common as to be normal. If the food wasn't reduced fat or reduced sugar then it was enriched in fibre. The idea of a healthier lifestyle seemed to be everywhere and it extended to the different coloured recycling bins parked outside the houses and to the solar panels on rooftops. We have all those things in Spain too but they are all, in my petrified English terms, a bit "Good Life" or brogues and good thick cardigans with cod liver oil at breakfast rather than the norm.

I started this piece before leaving the UK but the phrasing was so bad (I blame having to type on the tiny Android keyboards) that it had to have a serious rewrite. I'm home now trying to keep comfortably warm inside the house in Culebrón. It was great to be with family and their families. We ate, talked and drank to excess. They gave us sumptuous gifts and we replied with bath salts and woolly gloves but it was lovely to relive one of those Christmases which eventually slows to a crawl as everyone dozes in front of the totally ignored telly in an alcoholic haze or turkey coma. Of course it wasn't even real gogglebox as it came from Netflix but the continuity was there.

I have to be honest though. Great place to visit but I'm glad to be home.