Despite being a
catholic country, Christmas creeps on you surprisingly slowly in rural
Catalonia. Instead of being assaulted by
a baseball bat of Christmasness sometime mid-September like back in Blighty,
you can find yourself halfway through December before you finally twig that the
big day is looming large and as per usual you’ve done jack shit about it all.
For those who have
recently moved to rural Catalonia, or for anyone considering living here in the
coming years I’ve created a guide as to how you know it’s Christmas in
Catalonia. It’s really simple, look for
these clues:
Sometime in October, inexplicably
your favourite items in the supermarket will have been replaced by rows and rows
of turrón (a type of nougat). Boxes and boxes of panettone will follow in November, despite not a single person in
the supermarket ever buying either one of these products (and panettone being
Italian).
By mid-November the
ends of each aisle in the supermarket become a health and safety hazard as you
attempt to weave your trolley around precariously balanced displays of either cava or Ferrero Rocher, or in some very imaginative places, both.
Early December sees
the usual 1940s wartime music on the village announcement tannoy (yes we have one of these) be replaced by some good
old fashioned Christmas Carols. Each day
at 1.30pm precisely you will be treated to an extremely scratchy Catalan
version of We Three Kings, not
quite the same as the Salvation Army band striking up but relatively festive.
By the third week of
December some entrepreneurial youngsters will knock on your front door offering
to sell you chocolate advent calendars
for €3 a chuck. They will then proceed
to call you a miserable git when you refuse and they spy you’ve got a couple of
kids.
Come the beginning of
December the presence of Yuletide becomes more obvious as halves of dead animals
will suddenly appear in the freezer section.
From baby suckling pigs to
sheep; sawn straight down the middle from nose to tail and plonked in between
the fish fingers and Dr. Oetker pizzas.
 |
| "Sawn in half, then frozen? Get the fuck outta here!" |
A few days prior to
the big event you will be invited to the village music group’s (of which your
son is a member) Christmas concert. This will involve sitting, watching and
giggling at some of the village’s finest young musical talents murder their
instruments one by one. This ordeal will
last approximately 4 hours and there won’t be a hint of liquor around to make
it more palatable. It will cease to be
funny sometime around 9.30pm when you realise they’ve only just completed the
woodwind section and there’s brass and percussion to follow. Just in case you’re tempted to nip out the
back door and slope off, the sly bastards keep the kiddie’s Christmas carol bit
until the end, somewhere around 11.30pm.
On the last day of
school you will be invited to watch the children perform in a carol concert in the village church—unless
it rains, which it does almost every year.
Clearly weeks of practicing for both children and staff alike mean
nothing if some of that there wet stuff falls from the sky, this is particularly
annoying as the church is practically next door to the school.
Everyone starts
talking about some log that shits presents for the children when spanked with a large stick.
The ‘caga
tió’ is a proud Catalan tradition that I have yet to get my English head
around.
On Christmas Eve, Santa will ride around the village on the
back of a tractor. Not one single child
under the age of 8 will actually be able to see him, this is because almost every
teenager in the village will be surrounding him dolling out beakers full of
nuclear temperature hot chocolate whilst smoking Marlboros and pretending to
look cool. Thinking on, I’m guessing the
music club teenagers probably aren’t in on this.
So there you have it, the definitive guide
to the run up to a Catalan Christmas. Luckily
for me I have British television so I can fill my boots with misogynistic adverts from Asda and Morrisons, be informed daily of the latest sofa sales at DFS and
laugh my tits off at Brad Pitt’s Chanel No. 5 advert. The
best of both worlds!
