THE CATALAN CHRISTMAS FROM BARCELONA TOWARDS THE WORLD


BARCELONA, 4 December 2009.

As many others European cities do, Barcelona erects Christmas decoration being the centerpiece a life-size crib in la Plaça de Sant Jaume. The Christmas season begins in Barcelona with the opening (la fira de Santa Llúcia) of Christmas fair in front of the cathedral from now til 23 December. The traditional Catalan Christmas decoration is a crib, hence the core of this fair consist of crib makers who produce beautifully crafted figures of the several characters in the nativity scene. One of the most popular is el caganer. EL CAGANER: THE CRAPPER. It is a small figure of a man doing his business in the nativity scene, being a very popular tradition in the Catalan yuletide. Not clear where it comes from, though it's believed to symbolize fertilizing the soil. Many people collect these figures which face is inspired in a fiction or real and famous people, every year there're lots of new models. You can get el caganer with the face of Bart Simpson, Pau Gasol, Sherlock Holmes, Lionel Messi, among many others celebrities. Different sections of the fair are specialize in miniature trees and anything else needed to set up a nativity scene. The stalls in the narrow streets alongside the cathedral sell a wide variety of gifts and craft work.

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