Mount Orégano

Christmas in Spain doesn't end until the Reyes Magos, the Three Kings, bring gifts to all the children on the night of January 5.

They will arrive in Madrid in a gala parade, and their royal entourage will throw toys and metric tons of candy at the hundreds of thousands of spectators who line the route. It often rains, and people bring umbrellas even in good weather to turn upside down to catch more goodies.

At the end of the parade, their Royal Highnesses, who are portrayed by alderman, will be welcomed by the Mayor, who will present them with a key to the city, which is how they will get into all the homes to leave their gifts. One of the Kings will read a message to all the children. In previous years he encouraged children to recycle their gift wrap and boxes or he condemned terrorist attacks by Basque separatists.

But first, the Kings will visit a live Nativity scene and present Baby Jesus (usually a doll, since winters here can be chilly and damp) with gifts of gold, incense, and myrrh, as the Bible says, though the Bible doesn't explain why they give those gifts. The usual explanation in Madrid is that Jesus gets gold because He is a king, incense because He is a god, and myrrh because He is a human baby.

Why does your baby need myrrh? Two thousand years ago, myrrh was also known as Balm of Gilead, a medicine used to cure diarrhea, which, then as now, killed many babies. Even gods and kings must survive their childhoods in order to reign.

Since the Middle Ages, one of the Kings, Balthazar, who brings the myrrh, has been depicted as a Black African. The others are Gaspar, who brings incense, and Melchior, gold. Together the Kings represent Asia, Europe, and Africa, the three known continents at that time. (The photo, taken in the museum of the Cathedrals of Salamanca, predates the Middle Ages.)

Since there are no Black politicians in Madrid, that alderman and the children depicting his royal pages wear lots of dark makeup. No one finds it scandalizing here.

No one is scandalized either that so much of this tradition is folk tale than Biblical. The Bible, in the first half of Chapter 2 of Matthew, says only that some magi, which probably means astrologers, came from the east, wherever that was, led by a star, hoping to worship the King of the Jews, who had been born up to two years earlier.

The exact number is uncertain, they aren't kings, and their names aren't provided. The baby may have been a toddler, and may not have been sleeping in a manger. The date of the birth is not given.

It seems to me that the best way to celebrate Christmas is not to think too hard about the details of the traditional Christmas story because the story falls apart. Except, maybe, for this detail:

Medicine was among the first Christmas gifts, the gift that we have almost forgotten about. Babies needed medicine to survive. Two thousand years ago, the wisest men in the world knew that and traveled far to deliver it.

Babies still need medicine to survive. They don't all get it, and many die today, unnecessarily. So why are we celebrating? As we do unto the least of them, we do unto Him.

Keep Christ in Christmas.

[Also posted at http://www.sue.burke.name]

This is one of the most popular poems in Spain:

Traveler, your footsteps
are the road, nothing more;
traveler, there is no road,
you make the road by walking.
By walking you make the road,
and when you look back
you see the path that
you'll never walk again.
Traveler, there is no road,
only wakes in the sea.

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.

The author is Antonio Machado, born in Seville in 1875. His works, first published in 1901, showed the influence of Modernists like Rubén Darío, but, after his wife's death, he found his own voice, simple and philosophic. His poems often dealt with the landscape and the people around him in lyrical language but critical terms. A gentle sorrow emerges from his frequent themes: death and time.

He worked as a teacher in several cities in Spain. He married in 1909 at age 34 to a 15-year-old, Leonor. The marriage was happy, but she died of tuberculosis in 1912, and the poems dealing with her death spurred his stylistic maturity. The poem "Caminante" appeared in a 1917 collection called "Proverbios y cantares."

That collection also included this tragic, prescient poem:

There's now a Spaniard that wants
to live and begins to live,
between a Spain that dies
and another Spain that yawns.
Little Spaniard who joins
the world, may God keep you.
One of the two Spains
will freeze your heart.

Ya hay un español que quiere
vivir y a vivir empieza,
entre una España que muere
y otra España que bosteza.
Españolito que vienes
al mundo, te guarde Dios.
Una de las dos Españas
ha de helarte el corazón.

The expression "the two Spains" may have originated with him, but not the troubling observation that Spain had split into two halves, each side hating the other half. That idea goes back a century earlier, perhaps longer. The rich-poor, leftist-rightist split eventually widened into the Fascist-Republican disaster and the vicious, bloody Spanish Civil War.

Machado was teaching in Madrid when the war began in 1936, and he and his elderly mother fled from the Fascists first to Valencia, then to Barcelona. His health deteriorated. Finally they went to France in 1939, and on February 22 he died in Collioure, where he is buried. The photo is of his bust in front of the National Library in Madrid, Spain.

More Machado

Listen to popular Spanish singer Joan Manuel Serrat sing "Españolito" at  http://www.poesia-inter.net/canc0034.htm

The translation of "Caminante" is mine. You may prefer another translation by Jean Craige at http://www.cha.uga.edu/bjc/machado.htm

Read many more of Machado's works in Spanish (and a few translations) at Poesía en español at http://www.poesia-inter.net/indexam.htm

And of course there's more at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Machado

(This post is also published at my website: http://www.sue.burke.name)

I hadn't seen the USA for two and a half years. It seemed different: prettier, cheerier, and tastier. Fatter. And so American. The things that felt strange, changed, or normal is the topic of this month's home page article at my formal website:

http://www.sue.burke.name

What are the main differences between and oak tree and Marine? One makes its own energy, about as much in a day as the other uses. One is the dominant species. In both cases, it's the tree.

Don't believe me? Read this month's front page article at my formal web page, "If I were a plant," at http://www.sue.burke.name

 What would The Wonder Years be like if the years weren't wonderful? What if the show were set in the final years of a long, brutal, repressive dictatorship, punctuated by terrorist bombings, while society underwent unrest and wrenching changes?

Then you'd have my favorite television show, Cuéntame Cómo Pasó [Tell Me How It Happened]. It follows a family in Madrid, Spain, from 1968 through the Transition to democracy after the death of the dictator Franco, told from the point of view of the family's younger son, Carlitos, just 8 years old when the series began.

Read more about the show that Hollywood could never produce in this month's front page article of my formal website, www.sue.burke.name

Find out why cardoons are a delicious but dangerous Christmas dinner vegetable in Spain. A cardoon FAQ this month's home page article on my formal website: http://www.sue.burke.name

 Witches mean good luck in Spain -- well, usually good luck. They can help or hurt you. And they survived the Inquisition because the Church protected them. Learn a little about the ancient magic of Spain in this month's home page article on my formal website, http://www.sue.burke.name

If you hike the Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James pilgrimage route in Spain, you will find God. That's what they told me, anyway. I walked a little bit of the route in Madrid's mountains and may have glimpsed something besides a lot of rocks, history, and wildflowers.

The full story is this month's front page article on my formal web site:
http://www.sue.burke.name

As the voting for Europe's top pop song drew to a close on May 12, it became a contest between two performers. One was a Romany tomboyish lesbian from Serbia singing the tragic ballad Molitva (Love Prayer). The other was a silver-clad drag queen from Ukraine, whose song Dancing Lasha Tumbai seemed vaguely insulting to Russia, in the event that it meant anything at all, which it probably didn't.

Russia was coming in at a distant third. Its sexy girl group Serebro sang Song #1 in English with such lyrics as "I'll blow your money money, I'll get you to my bad ass spinning for you." [sic]

And so the controversy was served — but not the one you think if you don't know about Eurovision, a 52-year-old pageant of painfully mediocre pop songs. This year's three-hour show was watched by 120 million viewers across Europe.

To find out who won and why, visit this month's front page article on my website: http://www.sue.burke.name