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

Names and seasonal stuff

Today and tomorrow are the days to eat roscón, roscón de Reyes. I've written about it several times before, check this link for earlier blog posts. So no real detail this time. It's a bit like a big doughnut, a cake to be eaten around epiphany, when the Three Kings, The Three Wise Men, allegedly arrived with their odd gifts for the baby Jesus - not a Scalextric American Police Chase nor a Linkimals Smooth Moves Sloth in sight but a couple of tree resin extracts and, always useful, gold.

I've bought roscones lots of times. Buy them from a cake shop, made to order, and they cost an arm and a leg, well around 25€ which is pretty expensive for a cake. In supermarkets the price varies a lot. You can get some for five or six euros but the one I'd seen judged as the best for this year was from one of the low price supermarket chains, Día. I was expecting to pay around 10€ but I couldn't find one. I went back and forth to our local branch five times over three days and I tried another branch in another town. They said they had sold out and were waiting for deliveries. No success cakewise.

From my experience of a couple of countries I am going to extrapolate. Once upon a time, in the UK, to talk about a vacuum cleaner you would say Hoover, to describe a vacuum flask it was a Thermos, sticking plasters were Elastoplasts, Armco for the crash barriers, Jacuzzi for the hot tub baths etc. In the same way similar things and their brands may be well known in different countries whilst others are world brands. I know very little about guns but I think that British soldiers of my dad's generation used Lee Enfield rifles, and that British soldiers on the streets of Northern Ireland used something called an SLR. I suspect that is peculiarly British knowledge whilst the "Soviet" AK-47 Kalashnikov and the US Americans, M14 rifle are so well known as to be almost cliches. For some strange reason I know that the famous Spanish rifle is called a CETME.

Now a little while ago I heard someone say they were going to buy some Chirucas. I thought it was a word I didn't know but it turns out to be a trade name for a brand of Spanish boot - the sort that hunters or mountaineers might use. I decided that I could be Spanish minded and link this idea of doing the Camino with buying something intrinsically Spanish. It turned out that Chirucas and I are not a match made in heaven. The 44 is too tight, the 45 is floppy. Also, very unsatisfactorily, the label inside the model I liked said, in English, Made in Vietnam. No success bootswise.

For some reason Madrid doesn't load a bunch of fireworks skyward on New Year's Eve. There are plenty of New Year traditions though. One of the main ones is eating grapes. Again I've written about this so check it out here if you're interested. Anyway we were at a party on New year's Eve. The house we were in usually watches platform based telly - Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. - rather than broadcast stuff. For a live event though it needed to be broadcast telly. The two main choices were the state broadcaster who broadcast from in front of the most famous clock in the Puerta del Sol Spain in Madrid and a private station which now has a tradition of being hosted by a team which includes a woman in a revealing "dress". As the most technically adept person in the house struggled to fight past the adverts and cookie warnings to connect his laptop to the telly in time for the midnight chimes we missed the critical moment. We had no chance to eat our grapes. New Year was declared at about 00:02 hrs. by someone in the room. No success grapewise.

Looking forward to a torchlight procession as part of the Kings parade tonight though.

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.