I just took the last of the Christmas decoration boxes down to the storage room. A melancholy mood has settled over me as the silly season has officially come to a close. Tomorrow the University students from the Forestry School will come to pick up the tree we have had leased from them for the season, and the last vestiges of Christmas will be completely gone until the end of next November. What better way to combat melancholy with a review of the season?

City Lights

So being good ritual fearing Americans we had to wait until after Thanksgiving to kick off the festivities. As all festivity clocks seem to be synchronized, the first day of turning on the Christmas lights in Madrid just happens to be the 4th Thursday of November, which also happens to be Thanksgiving. As we actually tend to celebrate on Saturday instead of Thursday, it was just another day for us, but we did find a chance to run out and check out the new lights they had strung near our house:

Music

I used to make MP3 CDs with collections of all the Christmas albums that I could find, but now Spotify and 365 Day a Year Christmas music channels have made that need antiquated. Needless to say once passed the Thanksgiving barrier our house was full of Christmas cheer from the living room to kitchen in all walking hours. I did make one improvement this year, retooling my wife’s old iPhone 6 Plus into a streaming device connected to our living room radio via an official Apple Lightning dock bought second hand on Walapop for 20€. It was rather amusing as the first iPhone came with a dock that had a mini jack to split music and got lots of use, and I was searching high a low on the internet for just such a thing a newer iPhone and found nothing until I thought to check what Apple offered. It appears that it might be on the way out as at the Apple store it was not available, but having found the reference was enough to find one second hand and will give a whole new extended life to the iPhone 6 Plus (Remember kids: the first of the 3 “r”s is reuse). I was also to make a significant upgrade to our endless Christmas songs figuring out how to get the same music streamed to our kitchen and living room at the same time. This involved taking advantage of our Spotify Family account and setting up a specific family member account for the iPhone 6 Plus and adding it to a remote group session when we want to have the music throughout the whole house (used daily really).

Tree

Respecting the Thanksgiving demarking line, the earliest possible date to have leased a tree for us would have been Sunday November 26th, but as my main partner in crime is herself a first year university student, we had to accommodate her availability to help in the sacred ritual of tree selection, which was not until Thursday November 30th. At least we made our target to get a tree before December. Our initial desire fortunately was out of our budget as the Forestry School students only accept cash (something I seem to always forget):

So we had had to accommodate our budget that was limited to the cash we happened to have on hand: 110€. This was all VERY fortunate because our first pick would have been multiple feet taller than our living room ceiling. We were able to secure a tree before the December deadline but the actual decorating of it had to wait until the weekend and as always turned out spectacular:

Advent Calendar

So, not sure how many other Californians have this tradition, or if it is unique to my family as they had lived a few years in Germany, but when I was a kid my mom always made an advent calendar. Her advent calendar was with match boxes wrapped in paper and tied in a tree formation and contained little gifts that would fit in a match box. I felt a little contained by the match box size limitations (and where would I find match boxes?) so I have gone with envelopes for my advent calendars which afford the convenience of coming in all sorts of sizes and I tend to have a mix of all sorts. This year I included gifts for my imitate family as well my mother in law and wrote the name of the recipient on the back. Here is how it looked on December 1st:

Baking

This year I never got around to baking any cookies, but there was a bit of unplanned trip to Los Angeles that did allow me to spread a bit of Spanish sweetbread traditions in the form of a Roscon de Reyes a bit premature on Christmas day with my family in the States that very well received. Here is the picture of it:

In total I made quite a few Roscons and plan to make one in the coming weeks for my coworkers as it is a tasty treat that needs to be enjoyed when the ingredients are available.
I was able to also make an almond roca and share with multiple neighbors which is a good tactic when fresh almond roca has been made, otherwise all will be eaten without realizing it!

Movies

As you can appreciate at this point, I am a bit of a hound for traditions and love Christmas movies. As everyone’s concept of Christmas movies is a bit different I will limit myself to only listing the ones I was able to enjoy again this year:

• Love Actually
• Die Hard
• Christmas Vacation
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Closing Thoughts

And so this was my post Holidays blues post. Can’t wait until the next silly season!

Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).