Tonight’s the night!
Tomorrow is Epiphany, also known in Spain as Los Reyes Magos – the magic kings.
Of course referring to the three wise men – the three kings – who visited the baby Jesus bearing gifts. The tradition of gift giving in Spain during the Christmas season focuses on this day and, instead of writing letters to Santa, children here write to Los Reyes Magos.
And on the eve of Los Reyes (January 5th) there is a huge parade held in most towns, cities and villages called the Cabalgata, with floats pulled by small tractors – each one depicting the characters from various fairy tales and traditional stories for children.
The last float carries Los Reyes Magos – meanwhile, all of the floats have lots of children on them who toss out sweets to everyone waiting along the parade route. After the parade has passed the streets are sticky with broken candies and melted sugar …
Another tradition of Reyes is to eat roscon – a somewhat gross looking pastry filled with whipped cream and topped with candied fruit and toasted almonds. I’ve never tried this myself but this morning I convinced Nog that he had to go for it, as our favourite brekky bar serves slabs of this stuff during the festive season. He said he liked it but couldn’t see himself eating mass quantities of it . . . typically vague 😉
casa azahar 
That sounds really fun, I had no idea the Christmas traditions were so different in Spain. I guess its because of its Roman Catholic heritage. We lived in Holland for several years when I was little and I still remember the excitement of putting my pair of clogs outside the door and hoping that St Niklaus would put a present in them, rather than sending in ‘Schwarzer Peter’ after me because I’d been bad!!
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Schwarzer Peter???
Here you can also buy black lumps of sponge candy ‘coal’ – it really looks like the real thing from a distance.
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Tossing all that candy around has just go to be pretty messy!
The pastry sounds okay, if I ate whipped cream…
Actually my fave pastry is a spinach croissant. Yum. No a sweet one at all, though.
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It never ceases to amaze me just how different all the “Christmas” celebrations are, all over the world. And each one is the “right” way to celebrate the season. For me, the 5th of January is “Twelfth Night” and so is the night when all Christmas (or Yuletide) decorations need to be removed and Christmas is put away in a box until December.
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Likewise in Spain … all the Christmas lights will be shut off tonight.
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It has always been the tradition in our family to put up the tree and decor shortly before Christmas and then take it down on 12th night or Epiphany. Around here, people tend to decorate shortly after Thanksgiving (unless they are Walmart, and then they start shortly after Labor Day) and have them down before the first of January. My habits are viewed by my neighbors as odd and dilatory.
At least I’m not like the woman who burned her house down last year because she left her tree up until April and then accidentally brushed it with her cigarette.
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