This is a link to the Irish Embassy website in Spain where you are kindly invited to join in the worldwide celebrations of St Patrick's Day. The celebrations will be virtually all online again this year.
Still, you can enjoy the speeches, the scenery, children dancing and Lisa Hannigan's latest song. All beautiful.
Please goodness we will be able to celebrate together next year.
REACH FOR THE STARS
Two generations of women's rights and an enormous distance travelled in a very short time are represented in these two links below.
Don't forget to wish all the women in your life a very happy day!
It is not just the glorious pictures that we like here, but also the beautiful texts that accompany them.
Nacho's dog Mapoe comes to our rescue
This tree was splendid in May.
The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it.
Oscar Wilde
The Snowfall
First there was a silence, then the birds began fluttering from tree to tree and then the neighbours started appearing to try and trudge through snow that was knee high and see what they could do about it.
It was the
third day, a Sunday, the sun had come out, the sky was clearing and everybody
set to work after the luxury of a weekend of snow like we had never seen
before.
On the second day, a Saturday, snow lovers in Madrid were able to take out their skis, their snowboards their sleighs even huskies because many people in Madrid are well equipped for the snow. (Spain has a family of Olympic skiing champions who live in a town in the nearby sierra.) Others ploughed through the snow falling clumsily but enjoying every minute.
Instead of visiting the snow in the sierra, the snow had come to visit the city dwellers at a time when there were many restrictions of movement because of COVID, on the weekend after the muted visit of the Reyes Magos. It was a beautiful compensation and indeed it felt like a gift.
On the first day of snow, Friday the 8th young people were out having fun in the snow but that night it was clear that the city would be covered in a blanket of snow. It snowed all night and we had half a metre of snow on Saturday the 9th. The pictures of La Puerta Del Sol looked like a picture by Breughel.
Madrid is also a paradise for birdwatchers.
Sing along with Slade and this hit from 1973.
Christmas is over in some countries on the 26th and parents can relax and children play with their toys during the Christmas holidays. Not so in Spain where they still celebrate Old Christmas day, the Epiphany, on the 6th January.
This means that children have to wait until the 6th January to receive their presents as this is the day when the three kings, the three wise men arrived in Bethlehem bringing their gifts to the child that was going to save the world,
The night before the 6th January in Spain and in Spanish speaking countries there are parades with floats carrying wondrous scenes from children's stories to attract and captivate the children who are lining the streets with their families. But the main attraction are the magnificent floats carrying Melchor, Gaspar and Baltasar, the three kings from the East. It is dark when the parades cabalgatas finish and everyone rushes home with the sweets they have gathered from the parade. Unlike the song above, the children do not hang a stocking on the wall. They put their shoe outside the bedroom door and the magic happens. Year after year. It is a tradition so embedded in their culture that few can make sense of Father Christmas or Santa Claus as we call him in Ireland. The magic goes on from one generation to the next in Spain where everyone believes in los Reyes Magos.
The question is ¿Qué te han traído los Reyes Magos? not 'What did Santa bring you?' but 'What did the three Kings bring you?'
