But Wait, There’s Myrrh!

If you suffer from post-Christmas letdown, I recommend you take a trip to Spain for the last 7 or 8 days of Christmas, through Epiphany (January 6). Because there, the season is just beginning on Dec 26!
They’re kinda in denial about winter. The sidewalk tables are outside all year, and it doesn’t matter if you opt to sit inside because the doors will remain wide open. Oh and the only soup you can get is cold creamy gazpacho. I mean, it’s good, but, 40 degrees and spitting rain, I coulda really gone for some Caldo Gallego.

For us here, the holiday season is SO OVER on January 2. Back to work, back to dieting, etc. but in Spain the climax is Epiphany! That was the traditional gifting holiday, and Spanish children hopefully set out, not their stockings , but their shoes. And on the Eve of Epiphany, the Three Kings come to town with great largesse and splendor.

Eight years ago I was in Còrdoba for the Tres Reyes parade. I have lost almost all of my travel journal posts from that trip somehow, they have been wiped out. But I have January 5 and 6, 2015. A wonderful and memorable trip.

Followed by a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month and, mostly, year. We had to sit in the Seville airport all day when we started home because the planes that land there aren’t on instruments and they couldn’t land in the fog. When we got home we both had a terrible “Spanish flu,” really the only time in my entire life I can remember doing nothing but lying in bed for like 3 days. But worse was to come: later that month as I sat in a gay noisy old tavern, I got the bad news call from my sister. Fear slipped into the booth beside me, and never left my side. In April I stayed with her in the hospital for ten days after she had the head-excavating surgery. The intervening months were a pit of terror. The person writing this is not the same person who wrote the Email titled “But wait, there’s myrrh,” on January 5, 2015.
But enuf (and more) about me. Visit southern Spain the first week of January if you get the chance!
Prospero año e felicidad!