Towards the end of November, they had a castañera at school: a chestnut-roasting party. Delicious, though just a few castañas go a long way, but it was delightful holding a couple piping-hot chestnuts in my hands in a cool breeze. And since this was held on the preschool playground and tiny little fingers had a hard time prying open stubborn nutshells, I was quickly forced to become an expert in chestnut shelling. I had slivers under my thumbnails for days.
Soon after that was Thanksgiving (the next best thing to being home: Pilgrim hats and Indian headdresses, pumpkin pie, turkey, and a whipped cream fight, with many thanks to hostess Kacie and her flatmates!), and I had long discussions with most of my classes about what they were thankful for. The five-year-olds, naturally, had the most interesting answers, ranging from their families to Virgin Mary to their dolls to soldiers to flowers to… pigeons. Yep. Thanksgiving in Spain—never a dull moment.
We also had the Christmas concert to deal with. After months of teaching the same Christmas tunes until our ears rang with jingle bells, all the little kiddies turned up dressed in the most adorable costumes. Santas, reindeer (complete with bright red foam noses!), angels, stars, and a slightly bizarre conglomeration of Hindu, Hawaiian, cowboy, Indian, and Argentine dancers. Oh, and kung-fu fighters. Because it was also Multicultural/Biodiversity Month, and… yeah, that’s all the explanation I’ve got!
At any rate, as I mentioned in the title, I spent all of December teaching “Let It Snow” to the five-year-olds. Apparently it worked a little too well…
Traffic and Weather Report
I think every flight I took over Christmas vacation was delayed by weather. At separate points in time, I was nearly stranded in Zurich and Chicago, and was frantically texting roommates and asking them to notify my folks (and vice-versa, on the return trip). The details don’t bear repeating, but it was a giant, headache-inducing fiasco on both sides of the ocean. But, both times, I eventually arrived. To a LOT of snow. Isn’t it funny how quickly you get used to a warmer climate? Despite not feeling the cold of Madrid nearly as much as the madrileños, I got home and promptly froze.
I do believe we had a high one day of -1ºF, and I was definitely up at 7 a.m. Christmas day to snowblow so we could actually leave our driveway. I’m sure we got at least 18 inches while I was home. Made for some great photographs to impress my students back here, though! Even if certain people still claim not to believe me. :-) (Still working on that snowball shipment, Jose. It might be stuck in customs.)
Because when I got back to Madrid, just after Pichu (bless her heart) picked me up from the airport, it started to snow. Fairly heavily. So my first night back in Spain after the holidays had me feeling like I’d never left Minnesota: Pichu and I were eating supper in a Burger King and watching the thick white stuff coat everything outside. The next morning I ended up not going to work at all, because the buses to Majadahonda weren’t running due to the snow! Total accumulation: about 1 ½ inches. Snow day. Go figure.
Irony (n.): surviving a month of winter in Minnesota only to slip and fall on the ice in Madrid. But, once again, the photos were worth it: an icicle-covered Cibeles fountain is not exactly an everyday sight.
Carnival
Due to an unfortunately timed migraine, I did not get out and find some fabulous costume to scare the little kiddies like I did on Halloween. (Most of them were quite delighted, actually, but the first graders still called me “witch” and ran away when they saw me in the hallway a month later.) So I did the next best thing: I grabbed an apron and a spoon and made the world’s tallest and most awkward chef’s hat out of a giant piece of construction paper. All day long kids asked me if we were going to cook in class, and all day long I had to crouch to get through doorways. (Beginning to see how my dad feels walking through old European buildings…) Aside from the English teachers/flies buzzing around in their mini-strainer/compound eye glasses and saran wrap wings, most of the preschool and grade school kids were dressed up as various peoples from around the world. My second graders were cowboys and Indians and shot me dead a number of times. I guess I should be thankful I wasn’t scalped! I also had the interesting experience of helping kindergarteners get all costumed up in felt skirts or suspenders. And I saw the world’s cutest costume conglomeration: a little two-year old, wandering around dressed as a fuzzy little giraffe… with a Shrek mask. After everyone had paraded around the playground, they had their own Burial of the Sardine—only they burned the poor, giant paper fish instead of burying a little smelly dead one, like happens on Ash Wednesday somewhere in Madrid. (If that makes no sense at all to you, look up my blog entry from February of 2008 called “What to do with a dead fish”. If it still makes no sense at all, well, I can’t blame you on that one. It’s a sardine, for crying out loud!)
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