There is a video in which the youtuber Karin Herrero asks young passers-by to complete the words of well-known Spanish Christmas carols. The children don’t give a single one. “The virgin is…” To change ? Cleaning? “Towards Bethlehem he is heading…» The virgin, of course, everyone assumes, because who would have guessed that a donkey goes to Bethlehem RIN RIN? And while we’re at it, what does repair mean? And who is the narrator of this song, this patched-up character? The donkey? The virgin? A simple spectator?
I ask my mother to enlighten me, and the only thing she can tell me is that mending is sewing, but that fact only inspires more questions. Who is the narrator of the song Couture? From the conjugation of the sentence, it seems that he is stitching himself up, as if a bullet had been removed from him. That she sews socks while singing the song makes absolutely no sense, especially in the context of the donkey going to Bethlehem. It’s like saying: “Once upon a time there was a man who went to the zoo, I made myself an omelette”.
My mother also admits to me that the mention of the “chocolatillo” that they “pull” is historically incorrect (Who pulls it? Obviously we don’t know who because we don’t know anything, we only know that it is quite important to shout at the virgin, nine months pregnant, to run. Let her run where? If the virgin rides the donkey. Anyway, I can’t. Either I’m an idiot or the song makes no sense. I’m obviously an idiot, but at least I feel young).
And what about “Tell me child / whose are you». Imagining the baby Jesus living in a rural Andalusian town where neighbors ask him what his name is when they see him playing football in the square… This conjures up visions of Jesus as Manolito Gafotas in Carabanchel (top) when his mother shouts at him through the window to come up and eat the sausage for dinner.
The Anglo-Saxons describe the chestnuts roasted on the fire, the grandeur of the Birth and, in the case of “Have a merry little Christmas», analyzing in a short sentence the impossibility of controlling the circumstances which prevent us from being reunited with our loved ones at Christmas. Meanwhile, we chiquirritin upwards and chiquirriquitin down. Come on, if it’s true that the words of Spanish Christmas carols are being lost with new generations, maybe that’s not a bad thing.
I’m really sorry, because I am generally very proud of our culture, but I will continue to listen to the crooners at Christmas.
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