happy hollydays

Yesterday was the solstice, the shortest day, and, officially, the first day of winter in the northern hemisphere.

When I get back to the village, maybe we’ll burn a yule log to encourage the sun to return.

broken bridges

One of the things inherent in Spanish culture is the idea of fiestas. Yesterday, December 6th, was el Día de la Constitución, and tomorrow is La Inmaculada Concepción. Both are usually bank holidays, and, depending how they fall, there is often a ‘puente’ linking the two.

I’d expected today to be declared a national holiday to compensate for the fact that the Day of the Constitution fell on a Sunday. No such luck.

It occurs to me that the refusal to link la Constitución with la Inmaculada could be an affirmation of the separation of church and state. And I think we should be having a bank holiday to celebrate that.

having a good time

The weather in Spain is very predictable. Not just what weather there will be, but when it will happen. Last year, on September 10th I wrote about the first torrential rains of the autumn. This year, I received an email on September 13th including the phrase, “Greetings from stormy Madrid.”

It's a jungle out there

As you can infer from the photo, a lot of the rain in Spain has fallen in my back garden. Whether the rains will last long enough to do much good remains to be seen, but, for the moment at least, I don’t need to do any watering.

international book day

One wonders – well, this one does – who decides which “days” are to be allocated to what worthy purpose and which are to be publicised and celebrated. Wikipedia gives a list of international observance, but these things seem to be fairly hit and miss.

April 23rd: a great day for dying

Today, the day when Shakespeare, Cervantes and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died in 1616, is officially designated World Book and Copyright Day by UNESCO.

However, although yesterday the Google site was displaying a re-designed logo for Earth Day, today there is nothing special about the google.com logo, and on the google.co.uk site the reference is to St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday. (In fact, the birthday is only deduced from the fact he was baptised on the 26th.)

of branches and bunches

Half the people in the village this morning were carrying bunches of flowers and greenery, which reminds me that it must be Domingo de Ramos – Palm Sunday.

Ramo and rama are words I can never get straight. Checking today in the on-line Diccionario de la Real Academia, I see that rama is a branch emerging from the tunk or main stem of a plant. Ramo, on the other hand, is a secondary level branch that emerges from the rama madre, or, perhaps, a rama cortada del árbol. If branches change sex the further they get from the trunk or once they’ve been cut from the tree, no wonder I’m confused.