In which Doris insists that Sid stops and looks at some local decorations.
Christmas in Spain (and the Canary Islands are in Spain, despite being closer to the Western Sahara) is big on lights, decorations, and above all, really MAKING AN EFFORT to make those decorations. Not for the Spanish a chain of lights strung across the street by a council worker one evening using a cherry picker, no sir, the making of the decorations is part of the fun.
A visit to Pajara, on our way across Fuerteventura, illustrates this nicely. Decoration number one is a christmas tree made entirely of granny squares. 25m tall this year (possibly including the crochet star), the town’s crochet club add a new layer on each year. For scale, Doris is standing in the doorway of the first picture.
Animals and objects made of lights on a metal skeleton are big. Here we have Sid posing with a coach and horses, and the town’s permanent exhibit of a watermill transformed with the addition of an illuminated reindeer (or maybe elk?) and coloured water. The iPhone’s camera is good at many things, but the human eye is very clever at distinguishing between foreground and background, so you may need to look closely at the second picture to spot the elk (or maybe reindeer).
We were visiting on the 23rd December, and this exhibit-in-preparation looks like it will be a life-size stable reproduction, to last until the enthusiastic Spanish celebration of Epiphany, when the presents finally turn up, on January 6th.
They have also managed to include an entry for our ever-popular “things made out of tyres” competition.
And everywhere in Spain there are villages of santons. Two rules are paramount here. First, consistency of scale is not an issue. Any object can be any size. And secondly, the modellers have to do some more every year, with the result that the exhibition just gets bigger and bigger. Here in dry (if windy) Fuerteventura the village can be outdoors as long as all the objects are firmly nailed down. This example from La Olivia (“stop the car!” cried Doris) includes representations of the local church and windmills, and all sorts of local crafts and agriculture, as well as a camel market, presumably because the three Kings had to get their camels from somewhere.
This final panoramic shot is my attempt to show how the space available for the village has been ingeniously extended by building a ravine with a bridge over it to connect to the next flowerbed. Again, this is worth zooming in if you have the time.
Gosh, I do like santons.
Merry Christmas one and all, or as they say in Spain, Feliz Navidad.