Season’s end

A bare Christmas tree stands in the corner of the living room, waiting for a let-up in the rainy weather for us to take it our into the garden. It is supposed to be a living tree and hasn’t shed too many needles so there is a chance that it might survive in the garden until next year. The previous tree did two years and back in May looked set fair to manage another Christmas. Then came the UK heat wave and the poor thing dried out. None of my house-sitters realised that a tree in a pot in the garden needed watering. It’s not actually dead. There is new growth which occurred after the heat wave but all the new growth is on the end of very scrawny-looking bare branches. Of course the idea is that you dig a hole and plant the living tree. We did that with a tree some 25 years ago and ended up chopping it down about 15 months ago because its root system was causing havoc with the drainage. It was a great shame as it was a beautiful tree. Our eldest granddaughter refused to speak for us for weeks after the tree-felling; she doesn’t like change and reacted in similar fashion when we painted the front door in a different colour to the one she was used to! 

Anyway, the Christmas decorations have gone (except for the poinsettia – it’s a nice healthy little plant and it would be churlish to throw it out just because Christmas is over) so, according to one superstition, we should not have incurred any bad luck. Another one says that if you don’t take the decorations down by the 6th of January you must keep them up until the following Christmas to avoid misfortune. (Some people seem to do this with the fancy light displays outside their houses, simply not switching them on again until the next year.) Mind you, the other day I read that these superstitions/traditions were all created in Victorian times, along with the Christmas tree itself or so I have been given to understand. The idea was to encourage people to return to work by emphasising that the holiday period was over and done with. That sounds typically Scrooge-like! Before this period, people used to keep the decorations up until spring to add some colour to the grey winter months. 

When we were children, the decorations used to stay up until my brother and I had had our birthdays later in January. The tree disappeared – too dried up and messy – and the cards came down - to make way for birthday cards – but garlands and such stayed up. Then when we had our birthday parties the house was still decorated. Of course, in those days you had parties for a small group of friends in your home. Eight children seemed a lot. Nowadays, by contrast, it seems that you have to invite almost the whole class to parties and they take place in specialised venues with entertainers and much noisy excitement. Our middle grandchild is going to two parties in the next week or so. One of these is a horse-riding party. So that won’t be the whole class. The other is also number- (and gender-) restricted. It is a “pamper party”, taking place in a beauty salon, or at least that’s what she tells me. Why do ten and eleven year old girls need a “pamper party”? Shouldn’t they be running around playing musical chairs and other such games rather than having their nails painted? I’m going to have to start ranting about girls being pushed into stereotyped roles if this continues. 

Over in Galicia, I hear that the Three Kings managed to get around. They arrived at La Coruña by boat. 
 


And at Monforte by train. 


In Viveiro, finding that their procession had been cancelled because of the foul weather, the Wise Men did the decent thing and went walkabout through the town, distributing good will and sweets as they went. Pretty good! 

 Last summer I read a Spanish novel (the title and author currently escape me – I need to find my little “books I have read” notebook) in which one of the characters talks about having seen wolves or, at any rate, ONE wolf scavenging in dustbins in the outskirts of Madrid. Okay, I thought, urban wolves. We have urban foxes in the UK so why not urban wolves in Spain? My Spanish friends pooh-poohed the idea. There are no wolves anywhere near Madrid, they maintained. 

Well it seems that they were wrong. In the Guadarrama hills, only 40 miles from Madrid, wolves are breeding again. Experts reckon that the mountain range could support two or three packs but that there are currently around six packs. Farmers are complaining about livestock being killed. If the wolves can’t find enough to eat out in the wild, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that they will go scavenging in the waste left behind by city dwellers. They’re pretty canny animals, after all. 

A new era begins!