On the Sunday afternoon before Christmas, Demian and I decided to take Sasha to the Santa Llucia Christmas market in front of Barcelona’s cathedral for a look around. In and of itself, this was an extraordinary decision.
In years past, if I paid any attention to the market at all, it was to make sarcastic comments deriding the goods that were for sale and pitying the poor Catalans who had to make do with such a poor show.
This year, it was different. With Sasha in the picture, everything had changed. In a nutshell, what I used to deride, I now wanted to own.
The annual Santa Llucia Christmas market is a bit of an event in certain quarters of Barcelona and is certainly well known across town. Locally, it is THE place to go for your Christmas paraphernalia, including mistletoe, live Christmas trees (harder to find in these parts than in Canada), and decorative Christmas stockings. But without doubt, the most important reason to visit the market is to purchase a cagatió.
Allow me to explain the craziest Christmas tradition I have ever come across: the cagatió is a fixture in Catalan Christmas tradition, which tends towards the scatological. That’s right, the scatological. Christmas in Catalonia has a lot to do with pooping and the cagatió plays a central role.
The cagatió is a wooden log (yes, log - the double entendre is entirely intentional) with a face painted on it, wearing a little red hat and with little wooden legs to prop it up. Cagatió roughly translates into “pooping log.” See photo, above. It comes in varying sizes. All Catalan households own one.
The cagatió plays the same role as Santa Claus does in other countries, in that it (or he – the anthropomorphic overtones are a little hazy to me) is responsible for giving children their presents on December 25th. The signal variation is in the gift delivery system.
Whereas in our tradition, Santa squeezes himself down a chimney to leave presents by the tree sometime in the wee hours of December 25th, the cagatió delivers presents quite differently. About halfway through Christmas day, or whenever present-opening is supposed to begin, there is a knock on the door and the cagatió comes to visit. Upon seeing an inert painted log sitting on the doorstep, Catalan children go wild.
The log is placed on a table covered with a table cloth that reaches the floor.
[Parents, cover your children’s eyes. From this point forward, this blog entry is no longer suitable for very young readers.]
Gifts are hidden under the table, along with a couple of older children or an adult. The whole is hidden by the tablecloth.
Then the ritual begins. One by one, children 
approach the cagatió with a big stick. Each child proceeds to bang the log with the stick, while singing a Catalan incantation that is the approximate equivalent of:
“Poo-oo-ping log, poo-oo-ping log:
don’t poop out herring, because it’s too salty.
Poo-oop out turróns*,
because they’re really yummy.”
As if by magic, when the child is finished singing, their present shoots out from underneath the table, to the sound of rather explosive farting (at least in Demian’s family).
Each member of the family goes up and hits the log while singing out the incantation, until everyone present has received their gift.**
If you think the cagatió is scatalogical, you've only seen the tip of the poop, as it were. The other scatalogical star of the show here is the cagané. (Cagar = to poop, in Catalan and also in Spanish).
To explain the cagané, you must first understand that it is traditional in Spain to have a miniature nativity scene in your home at Christmas time. Placing a nativity scene in your home is akin to putting up Christmas lights or hanging a wreath on your door.
The thing is that in Catalonia, the nativity scene comes with a twist. In every nativity scene in Catalonia, there is an extra figurine, the cagané. The cagané comes in many shapes and sizes but is most often a figure of a man, trousers down, crouched and pooping. (See photo, below.) The figure always, always comes complete with a little dollop of poop on the ground beneath him. This figure is added to the nativity scene.
Seriously and for re
al.
The obvious question is, why? Rest assured that I have asked this question many times of every one of my Catalan friends. There really isn’t any definitive, satisfying explanation. The one I hear most often is that the cagané is a throwback to years past, when we all had to poop in the fields. This explanation attempts to pose the cagané as a sort of whimsical representation of our long lost rural past. Fair enough. But it still begs the question…why? Presumably, every culture had people pooping in the fields in years gone by (oh, the good old days) but only one culture chose to immortalize that particular scene in its Christmas iconography. Weird, no?
Either way, children go wild for both the cagatió and the cagané and no nativity scene in Catalonia is complete without the latter. In fact, caganés are big business these days, with all sorts of riffs on the theme. There are pooping Obamas, pooping Messis, pooping Bushes, a pooping Queen of England. Lots of poopers out there, to be had for 12 euros a piece. A real bargain, if you ask me, and definitely the most original true piece of Catalan Christmas tradition you can buy.
* Turrón is a traditional Spanish Christmas treat, originally made from almonds and also found in Italy.
** Christmas Day isn’t the big bonanza day for gift giving in Catalonia or indeed, Spain. Children might receive one or two gifts on the 25th so they only need to hit the log that one time. (Still, poor log.) The big haul happens on the 6th of January, the Epiphany, when the Three Kings came bearing gifts to see Baby Jesus in the manger. Every Spanish kid knows the names of the Three Kings. (Incidentally, do you? Not knowing that here is like not knowing who Lionel Messi is. And if you don’t know that, you are beyond hope.)
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