Letter of Recommendation: Tió de Nadal

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-tio-de-nadal.html

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When I was 5, I stood in my grandparents’ small, pipe-smoke-filled, well-loved apartment in Barcelona on Christmas Day, getting ready to hit a wooden log. The log wore a painted, smiling face and a red hat; its front was propped up on two legs like a sitting dog, and the rest of its body was covered with a checkered blanket. My grandmother had taken it out of storage, as she did every year, and lovingly set it up on the floor, dropping some clementine peels around its base to show that it had been fed. My role, as the youngest child in the family, was to sing to the log while I hit it with a stick, thus prompting it to defecate presents and nougat — for the log was magic, and this is what it did.

But this time around, I just couldn’t believe it was real. “It’s not alive, is it?” I tentatively asked the adults and cousins gathered. They confirmed that it wasn’t, so I went ahead with my understood child duties and whacked the piece of wood. Then I checked underneath the blanket for the surprises its bowel movements yielded — the ones that my grandmother surreptitiously placed there earlier in the week — and we all happily ate the candy.

The log, called the Tió de Nadal, is a staple of Christmastime in many Catalan households and schools. It comes from a rural, pagan practice that probably arose in the Pyrenees in the Middle Ages, though its exact origins are mysterious. (It helps, though, that Catalan culture is rife with a fascination with the scatological — our Nativity scenes even include a defecating man, called the Caganer, who is thought to bring luck by fertilizing the earth, and plenty of our swear words and popular sayings feature that bodily function, for which the main etymological dictionary includes more than 75 derived words.) Tradition has it that the log is placed in the home weeks before Christmas, then kids wrap it up with a blanket and feed it food and water. Each day, they find that the food has disappeared overnight, making it clear that the log has eaten it. Then, for Christmas, they hit it while singing. Like other tree-centered winter rituals, the Tió honors the earth and its abundance. Originally, this was done on the winter solstice, and it symbolized rebirth; the log was then burned and its remains kept in the home for protection. These days, Tiós are often found in local Christmas markets, where they’re sold as a cherished tradition to residents and photographed as a quirky local oddity by tourists.

A quarter of a century has gone by since that illuminating Christmas Day, and, surprisingly, the Tió has become the holiday custom I hold dearest. I have lived in a different country for years, but when I’m home for Christmas, my family doesn’t keep the tradition. It died with my grandmother — and in fact mostly stopped years before, when all the kids were grown up. But if I ever host a Christmas gathering, I plan to reinstate it, because unlike other holiday traditions, the success of the Tió isn’t contingent on innocence and childlike wonder. Actually, it’s so silly it doesn’t really lead even the youngest kids on, which is precisely what they deserve.

The holidays are nothing if not ripe for discoveries for children — including that your parents or caregivers have been lying to you for your whole life. In Spain, there are a lot of holiday beliefs to keep track of. Among others: The incontestable magical gift-bearers are the Three Kings, as in much of the Hispanic world; some families also celebrate Santa or Father Christmas, mostly because of American pop culture’s permeating screens for decades; and in Catalonia, there are those who also put out the humble Tió.

Some people still remember the minitrauma of finding out that Santa Claus or the Three Kings aren’t real — including me. Without question, the kings arrived via flying camels on the eve of Jan. 6, and there we all were, placing candy for their majesties and water for the camels on our city balconies. The significant faith I’d invested in those bearded men and their magic was only proportional to the shock of realizing, on the very night of their welcome parade, that they were products of a tangled web of lies perpetuated by adults and society at large. When I was 8, I asked my mother point blank — while we watched a procession in which carriages passed by, with pageboys and girls throwing candy at us and the Three Kings themselves waving — and she, for whatever reason, decided it was time to tell me the truth. I remember crying, suddenly seeing the ridiculousness of the grown people in costumes.

In my family (and I suspect, in many others), that disappointment was seen as a necessary rite of passage of midchildhood. But it doesn’t have to be. A tradition like the Tió, with its accessible mythology and brilliant (obvious) fiction, can gently help kids understand logic and laugh at themselves while doing so — instead of crushing their spirit or, worse, causing them to believe that it’s normal for strange men to slide down their chimney. It asks them to do something nonsensical like feeding and caring for an inert tree limb — not because good behavior results in presents, or to please a mysterious old man watching your every move, but because it’s a gloriously fun thing to do. The Tió may not have a flying animal friend or elves, but there couldn’t be a better Christmas miracle than one that doesn’t try to fool you.