For a start, it begins one day earlier in Spain. Tomorrow, the 24th December, is a big day here, with presents and a big meal. Christmas Eve in the UK isn’t really anything specific, apart from an excuse to open the jumbo tin of Quality Street sweets you’ve been desperate to break into ever since you picked them up in the supermarket a week before (or in my case, pick up two tins, chomp through the entire contents of one before Christmas, and then pretended I only ever bought one in the first place).
In Spain, the presents aren’t that big at Christmas. Little to average ones are handed out on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. That’s because the biggies are saved for January 6, the “Dia de Reyes” (Day of the Kings). Just when you thought everything was over and it was time to get back to work for another year, the Spanish pull this one out of the bag just to stretch the joy, celebration, over-eating and credit card limits a little bit further.
While everyone in the UK has already been miserably back at work for five days (or four if you’re in Scotland – they get January 2nd as an extra day to recover from the excessive boozing one on January 1st), the Spanish are parading through the streets in a series of floats celebrating the Three Kings, chucking sack-loads of tiny sweets at kids of all ages standing on the pavements as they go past (tip – using an upturned umbrella is a surefire way of catching a lot more sweets as they’re hurled with gay abandon from the passing floats. The drawback is that you tend to barge out the smaller and real kids who are standing under your umbrella trying desperately to catch whatever’s left. But the guilt wears off quickly when the sugar rush from the sweets kicks in.
Anyway, this year, we’re spending Christmas in Spain. Last year, we were in the UK, in six foot snow drifts and temperatures of minus 10. This year, it’s temperatures of plus 10 and a bit of drizzle if we’re lucky. I’m very much looking forward to it. But I will miss one thing from Christmas in the UK – the excitement and the danger.
What I mean by that is the annual festive playing of Monopoly and/or poker.
In my dad’s house these are not so much games as open warfare. Warfare indeed, but in a strangely controlled, yet thrillingly high risk atmosphere. For in this house, Monopoly and poker are not known by their given brand names – they are known as “Kill Or Be Killed.”
It’s a ritual, literally. Some families go to Midnight Mass. Some sing carols around the roaring fire, some sip hot mulled wine and toast the good fortune of friends and family.
In my dad’s house, we set out to utterly and completely destroy our gaming rivals as they sit round the table in wonky Christmas cracker paper hats, burping and farting furiously from all the beer, coke, little tiny sausages, roast potatoes, turkey and pistachio nuts they’ve consumed.
It’s the same adrenalin rush you get from sticking your finger in a live plug socket or slamming your younger brother’s head in the fridge door when he was six and warning him not to tell your dad or you’ll set fire to his favourite Scalextric racing car. You know it’s wrong, but you just have to do it again.
Quite why it generates such competitiveness is, now I sit here and think about it, a mystery. But it’s always been that way. While I don’t visit my dad’s every Christmas, when I do the games are the highlight of the festive week. And while it may result in angry slamming down of cards, the chucking of tiny red hotels across the table in tantrums and barely veiled threats of comic violence when you load the deck while others are getting a beer from the fridge or going for a pee, it remains tightly controlled around the table – as if there were some invisible boxing ring ropes surrounding it.
The vanquished may storm off to the next room to watch the telly and angrily stuff fistfuls of chocolates and peanuts down their gob so there won’t be any left for the others, while vociferously claiming an unspoken conspiracy by the remaining players to drive them out of the game and that “you’re all a lot of cheating bastards and I’m not playing with you again”. But you can bet they’ll be right back at the table the next time to do it all over again.
We should invite a psychiatrist around one year to observe. He’d probably suffer a breakdown watching it and have to call another psychiatrist just to take over from him.
Meanwhile, in Spain, the family are sitting round a big table full of top quality prawns, calamares, jamon Serrano and fish, quaffing champagne and sparkling wine and laughing loudly at others’ jokes, before falling asleep in front of the TV. It’s quite a culture-shift.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t find Spanish Christmases boring. Far from it, I love them. But they’re different. If Christmases were like films, then Spanish Christmases in my wife’s family would be like watching James Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life”. They leave you filled with warmth, cheer and happiness and a comforting after-glow.
Christmases in my dad’s house are like being in The Bourne Identity and Casino Royale at the same time, while being strapped to the front of the world’s fastest rollercoaster as a pack of angry Rottweilers snap and strain on metal chains just inches from your balls. Scary, shocking and nerve-wracking. But a hell of a lot of fun.
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