As I was saying: Last night the news was filled with pictures of grown men sobbing helplessly, their capirotes clutched to their chest. Because of the rain, their processions couldn't go out.

In happier Semana Santa-related news, the town of Corleone (yes, that Corleone) has just allowed its nazarenos to once again wear their capirotes during their processions. It seems that not too long ago, all that face-covering enabled certain, shall we say, rivals, to get close to one another, with the expected violent results. But now, Corleone is ready to show that it has transcended the past. At least its recent past. Because those processions date, after all, to the time when Sicily was part of Spain.

Another Reason I Know I'm Not Spanish

It's Semana Santa, and you know what that means: posters of agonizing Virgins and Christs plastered to every shop window. There are a lot of things I've come to appreciate about Semana Santa: the dark, soul-stirring music, the devotion that the men (and women!) who carry the pasos through the crowded night, the solemnity of it all, the 10-day vacation. But the delight and adoration that images of these suffering...can I say it?...statues excites, well, let's just say it's another thing I still don't get.

Happy Father's Day

It's Father's Day in Spain. Pretty much every other place in the world celebrates Father's Day in June (though not all. Estonia: November; Australia: September). But in Spain, the holiday falls on March 19 because, of course, March 19 is St. Joseph's day. As in Joseph, husband of Mary, adoptive father to Jesus. "It used to be a holiday," said our dry cleaner, meaning it used to be a day off. "But now that the politicians have gotten rid of it, you don't even know that it's here."

Well, some of us do. Feliz dia del Padre to ours.

The Grapes of Luck

Not everyone counts down from ten. Spaniards start the New Year count at twelve, and accompany each number with a grape, swallowed rapidly. This sounds like some Deep Spain, pre-Christian ritual, but in fact, its the 20th century invention of a bunch of grape farmers who found themselves with too much product on their hands. The solution? Convince everyone that shoving twelve pieces of fruit into their mouths in 12 seconds will bring them a year's worth of good luck.

Of course, Spanish grapes tend to be on the large side, and they invariably have seeds, which means that one's good fortune in 2007 could easily be brought to an abrupt end by choking. But here again, some enterprising Spaniard has found a solution: seedless, peeled grapes in a handy little can. Twelve in each, of course, though two cans come to a pack, the better for romance.

Referrals, Holiday Edition

Until recently "Spanish terms of endearment" has been the search phrase that draws the most Googling-viewers to this blog. And most of them, despite what we had imagined in certain romantic moments, are college students. No doubt looking for a quick sweet nothing with which to spice up a final exam.

But in the last month or so, all that has changed. Now our referral list is filled with searches for the Catalan crapper we've described here and here. So as a public service for all of you looking for a little dumper of your own, we hearby bring you the Caganer Website. Like Santa's elves, their artisans spend the summer and fall crafting tiny little crappers that look like that year's celebrities. Last year, the big seller was the Leonor caganer, handsomely carved and painted to look like the Prince and Princess's new baby.

This year, the star caganer is José Montilla (see above). That name likely won't mean anything to those of you who are not Spanish. But tell me he doesn't look like Dick Cheney.

Hints Are Dropping

Thanksgiving has now past, and you know what that means.

As we drove out this morning, fairly early, to walk along the beach, we encountered a jolly figure on our road that reminded us what’s just around the corner.

We’ve written before about the caganer, the Catalan crapper who shows up in nativity scenes this time of year. The caganer is a mischievous reminder that, despite the high serenity of the Virgin Birth, nature has its way.

There, just to our left, one of our neighbors was celebrating the start of Christmas season by staging his own nativity. Squatting, grunting, and grimacing, pants at his ankles, hairy bum in the air, he was—how shall we put this?—dropping his load. Though we were a bit startled, to say the least, our neighbor didn’t seem to mind, or even notice us, as we passed.

And so it was that as we headed out this morning, we realized that around here anyway, it is indeed beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

All Souls Come Out

Yesterday, while in the U.S. kids took their once-a-year chance to masquerade and solicit candy, in Spain, schools, banks, and businesses shut down so that people could lay fresh floral arrangements at the graves of their loved ones.

In Oviñana, this meant the dumpster beside the town cemetery was suddenly filled-to-overflowing with the phony flowers--burial site adornments the rest of the year--that had to be tossed to make way for the real thing.

El Caganer

I've come a little late to the whole "War on Christmas" debate, but Bill O'Reilly has reminded me why I choose to live in Spain, even if they can't make a decent doughnut to save their lives. Or bagel, as the case may be.

Let's lay aside the obvious, distressing fact that O'Reilly et al are marshalling the great democratic forces of the boycott not to Christianly protest against, say, the atrocities in Darfur or the high cost of AIDS drugs in Africa, or even, and let's be clear here, consumerism itself. Let's leave aside the whole bullying insistence that "the majority celebrate Christmas so the feelings of a few secular humanists and other heathens don't count." Leave aside as well the attack on freedom of speech. Is it not absurd that the judgement of whether a society is secular or religious comes down to what their mega-stores paint on their windows in December?

Here in Spain, they say "feliz navidad" and "felices fiestas" with equal, well, felicity. In fact, the "fiestas"--that would be "holidays"--is perhaps more popular simply because it is more grammatically correct: what we have here is a series of holidays: not just Christmas, but New Year's and Epiphany as well.

Which is not to say that they do away the religious completely. One of the most popular holiday pastimes in Spain is to visit the nativity scenes that are mounted in most every public square and, yes, shop window. These can be very elaborate affairs, not just Jesus and his folks and the kings and a couple of barnyard animals, but whole armies of peasants drawing water from wells, and children playing, and soldiers advancing, all of them dressed in robes and headscarves.

In Catalunya, there is one figure, however, who does not share the vaguely biblical dress: El Caganer. Also known as: The Shitter. Tucked into a corner of the creche, the Caganer squats with his pants around his ankles, a freshly-laid pile of excrement beneath his bare butt. Theories on the meaning of the Caganer abound: he represents primitive nature in the face of the divine; he’s the embodiment of the value Catalans put on the down-to-earth; he is another example of the important place of shit in Catalan folk culture.

And although most caganers wear traditional Catalan dress, in the past few years, it has become popular to shape them so that they resemble the most significant people of the year—part homage, part mockery. So while last year’s big stars in the caganer line-up were Felipe and Letizia (they married in May 2004), this year it is their newborn, Leonor, who will be taking a crap in crèches throughout Catalonia. Leonor, and George W. Bush. Perhaps the best-known group of caganer artisans use their website to ask clients to nominate the year’s new figures, and this year, President Bush was their choice. I wonder what Bill O'Reilly would have to say about that.

caganer, Christmas, Bill O'Reilly