2/13/2006 - A belated merry Christmas and happy New Year
A belated merry Christmas and happy New Year to all of you in La Canada, where streets and boulevards are now probably lined with your browning douglas furs ready to be trucked away. The Christmas tree is a symbol of the holidays that I have greatly missed here in Spain, whose citizens put nativity scenes as opposed to trees in their houses. Christmas is not celebrated as a traditional holiday here, beyond a special mass. The country, probably due to deep Christian roots in its culture, replaces the early morning “oooooohs” and “aaaaaahs” of the 25th of December with the “oooohs” and “aaaahs” of the 6th of January, or the day of the three kings. The concept of the holiday is essentially the same, though it is celebrated with enough little differences that you don’t feel green and red. On January 5th, the eve of Kings’ Day, after a traditional parade with music and dancing and even an appearance from the three kings, all of the children clean their shoes and put them in the living room with some sweets on a plate for the kings. Now, these magi have some similarity with Santa: they are wise old men, two white and one black, with long beards and rich clothing. During the night, when all the children have gone to bed early, the “kings” pass by and leave presents for the children by their shoes, if they have been good.
These holidays, however, can be difficult to those far from home, and I definitely felt the absence of my family through all of the festive cheer. AFS, the exchange program that placed me here in Spain, had foretold my emotional state. From their decades of experience, they were even able to show me a graph of how I would feel each month of the year. So far they have been right to the minute – the holidays were a small chink in an otherwise upward scale of happiness as time went on.
One of the good things about the holidays was that I was able to go see Madrid ( I live in Alicante, on the Mediterranean), which I still knew little about. I was interested to find, besides the plethora of beautiful monuments, palaces, and fountains, that the city was marked by something other than the seasonal festivities. It was the four hundredth anniversary of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’ national monument of a novel, and the streets were lined with statues of the lanky knight, each painted in a different, playful way. The city had become a literary art gallery, and we were all able to enjoy it which ever way we wanted!
I got my grades, and guess what? I compete…on a grading system of 1 to 10 (A+), I got a 6 average, even a 7 in History and a 6 in economics (5 is a “C”)…I’m happy, considering my classmates had a 15-year head start in Spanish. To celebrate, I’m off to the Pyrenees mountains to go skiing for 5 days with my school; a resort called Masella, right next to the French border. Only a 9 hour bus ride separates me from alpine bliss.
Hasta la proxima!
Morgan Hartley
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