Christmas the Christian festival has a defined start date. Christmas the Retail festival has a more expansive, elasticised beginning. A commencement that’s held back from its corpulent expansion by a gastric band called ‘Black Friday’, whose adjunct is a postscript to another country’s feast day. All the shop windows have morphed from white on black scripts exhorting numerals and percentages of savings to ones in red, green and snow. The arborists are pruning the street trees ready to be draped in lights, forklifts are arranging wooden cabins around the plaza. Two persons up ‘cherry pickers’ creating a gigantic Christmas tree out fir tree saplings, an unnatural natural rendition of the ‘perfect’ perfectly symmetrical Arbol de Navidad.
Christmas is a-coming.
At least it is December, so Christmas has a right to make its presence felt, even if I’m leaf-shuffling through long drifts and swirling in eddies of autumnal colour.
In Spain, Christian Christmas has an official start date, created by Pope Pius IX on the eighth December 1859 for the celebration of the Immaculate Conception. It’s the accepted day to dress the tree and to retrieve the nativity scene from the back of the cupboard.
We wandered the Christmas artisanal craft market in the Plaza Mayor yesterday, watching the world and his wife perambulating, and the vintage roundabout turning. Right in the middle was a large, anonymous box structure created out of panel boards with a bronze man stuck up on a plinth poking out of the top. I thought it a curious oddity, putting it down to some civic memorial restoration. Today we’re back in that same plaza to buy a gift, drink a coffee in the sun and to discover that the rough-hewn boards have been removed to reveal the belén: The Nativity. All the traditional characters are depicted, as is the shepherd’s hut with a string of bells on the wall, a cart with authentic straw bales circa 2024, as well as a field of ridged-up soil growing ornamental cabbages and a washing line of The Baby’s clothes.
It’s the great reveal…. they’re in blue and white… it’s a boy!