Christmas Traditions #1
Catalan traditions
“The Caganer” is as common in shops and markets as the baby Jesus or Mary at Christmas time. This little shitter is a widely popular trinket for the home. Its image has even found its way into a painting by Joan Miro, the great artist who also happened to paint a piece in 1935 entitled “Woman and Man in Front of a Pile of Excrement.” (Apparently, there are collectors of caganers, and there was an exhibit of some 500 of them during Christmas 1989 in a museum in Catalunya.) A Catalan pińˇ´ˇ called a “tio” (resembling the brown “buche de Noel” chocolate Christmas log of France) is filled with candy and the like - at Christmas, the children excitedly whack it with sticks, yelling “Caga, tiet, caga!”…
There is even a holiday (6 january, the Feast of Kings) where the confectioner’s stores carry little brown marzipan turds, sometimes even decorated with little sugar flies. Not sure of the origin of that…seems twisted even by Catalan standards.
The history goes way back… The earliest names for the two rivers that bordered medieval Barcelona where the Merdanca (shit stream) and the Cagallel (turd bearer). (Their waters were totally unfit to drink, needless to say.)
And in closing, as the folk saying goes: “Menjar be i cagar fort / I no tingues por de la mort”.
erm… thanks for the education Alex. Knowledge is power.
Along with Mannekin Pis, the Europeans seem obsessed by human waste products.