Oh Crap! Spain’s Best Christmas Tradition
By Isabel Armstrong, Third Year History
If you were to walk around Barcelona at Christmas, it would be hard to avoid the festive celebrations. The firas across the city sell churros, jewellery, paella, toys and gifts, and the many churches display enormous models of the nativity scene, with tiny figurines scattered across the landscape. Except, right in the back, there might be a tiny figurine, perhaps a Freddie Murphy, perhaps the Pope, squatting down, exposing their rear, and defecating.
This is the caganer, a traditional Catalonian Christmas statue. Whilst they traditionally depict a Catalonian campesino (farmer), wearing the red faixa and barretina uniform, the style – squatting, bare buttocks, small pile of poop – can be adapted to any person or thing imaginable.
The modern understanding of the caganer is that they bring a measure of faecal equality to the world, showing that regardless of how famous, rich, or beautiful a person might be, they all must succumb to the universal urge to defecate. The caganer can be traced back to at least the 18th century, but its origins have mostly been lost to time. Some historians link the caganer to pagan festivals, which often involved many days of feasting, and the subsequent faecal aftermath. Others point to the medieval carnival, which often involved a lucky peasant being chosen to act as ‘lord’ for the day. The carnival would permit the peasantry to air grievances about social inequality without truly undermining the feudal social structure. The caganer offers the same ability to humble elites by depicting them in a vulnerable, embarrassing position. To the religious, the caganer is also a lesson, representing the reality of the world that Jesus was born into.
The caganer often appears, or hides, in a nativity scene. The scenes found across France, Spain and Italy are quite different from the models which appear in British homes during the festive season. Whilst our nativity scenes are mostly focused on the stable and characters explicitly mentioned in the Birth Narrative, Catholic nativities are far more ostentatious, often depicting the entire town of Bethlehem and its inhabitants. The caganer is often hidden within the scene so children can search to find him amongst the houses.
The nativity tradition was first attributed to Francis of Assisi, who created a living nativity scene on Christmas Eve in 1223. Nowadays, they can be found in churches, piazzas and in the gardens of the rich, amongst other characters representing traditional chores, like washerwomen, spinners, or women caring for their chickens.
Catalonian humour is often stereotyped as obscene and eschatological, with some scholars linking this to the traditional rural nature of Catalonian identity. A Catalan’s response to the question “¿como ha sido?” (How did it go?) would perhaps be “como kaka” (like sh*t). Indeed, the defecating caganer is not the only faecal Catalonian Christmas tradition. The caga tío is a thick piece of wood with a painted face and a cloth covering its rear. Children ‘feed’ the caga tío across the Christmas period, and then beat it with a stick on Christmas Eve whilst chanting “Tió, caga torró, d’avellana I de pinyó” (Hey guy, sh*t nougat, hazelnut and pine nuts!). The cloth is lifted, and the presents hidden beneath are revealed, as if the log defecated them.
The caganer represents an interesting dissection of Catalonian society, reflecting the region’s fiercely independent and unique identity. It also provokes introspection of our modern society’s obsession with celebrity culture, given that the first question asked of customers upon stepping into the main caganer shop is “who would you like?”
Edited by Ben Bryant