Grape swallowing gene. Yes, yes, you know all about stuffing your mouth full of grapes but did you know that this New Year’s Eve custom only goes back to the beginning of the last century? Apparently, it was dreamed up by Valencia grape-growers in 1909 as a way of off-loading an extra-bumper crop. Although the Spanish have got the art of dispatching twelve grapes in twelve seconds down to a fine art, they do cheat. The Puerta del Sol clock in Madrid, which everybody watches on TV, is slowed down to a more digestible one strike every three seconds. Tip: peel and de-pip first.

Happy fishes. Most Spanish villancicos (carols) are jolly, upbeat numbers. Like the festive favourite: Los peces en río, the fishes in the river:

Look how the fishes are drinking in the river

But LOOK how the fishes are drinking in the river

They drink and they drink and they drink once again

The fishes in the river, on seeing that God is born.

Put the words to an upbeat tempo, add a deafening percussion of hand-clapping, foot-stomping, tamborine-rattling, bottle and spoon-clinking etc, and the picture is complete.

Shipping in the Kings. Two thousand years ago the Three Wise Men made their pilgrimage by camel. Last year, to Málaga, Tarragona and Palma de Mallorca they breezed in by boat; to Zaragoza they took the AVE; to León they chuffed in on the oldest working steam train in the country; to Alicante and La Rioja they dropped in by helicopter; and to the ski station at Sierra Nevada, they arrived – how else? – on skis. Surprisingly, the tradition of the King’s Day procession or cabalgata only goes back a hundred years or so.

Scaring the giant. Once upon a time a giant lived on the hillside near Algeciras. Being a bit of a killjoy, as non-Shrek giants tend to be, he sent a great grey cloud over the city on January 5 so that the Three Kings couldn’t see where the children lived. Now, during El Arrastre (The Dragging) on that day the children clatter and rattle and drag tin cans all over town to scare the giant. And to make sure they get their gifts.

Tooth-breaking cakes. On January 5 you can’t move for cake counters crammed with roscones de reyes – giant ring-shaped buns with bits of candied peel stuck on top and a plastic toy hidden inside. In Catalunya, the traditional tortell de reis comes with a cardboard crown and contains a broad bean and / or a bean-sized ceramic king. The lucky (toothless) person who finds it is proclaimed Bean King and gets to wear the crown. And also has the royal duty of reimbursing whoever shelled out on the cake.

Tags: Christmas traditions, Navidad, Spain

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.