Concealment and Revelation: Scatological Christmas Practices and the Politics of Shitting

On December first I received the following notice from La Llar, my daughter’s day care center:

Benvolguts/des pares i mares,
Ha arribat el Tió a La Llar i entre tots el cuidarem molt perquè es faci ben gran. Així, quan arribi el dia 21 de desembre, tindrà una panxa tan plena que, amb cops de bastó, li farem treure tot el que guardi a dins...

The best translation I can manage at this point is:

Dear Fathers and Mothers,
The log has arrived at the hearth, and, between everything else, we are taking very good care of him so that he will get very big. Thus, when the 21st of December arrives, he will have a very full belly, and, with whacks of the club, we will extract everything he holds within.

The note went on to state that the festa del Tió was only for the children, to announce an evening reception for the whole family, and to request a contribution of 3 Euros. Having done some research in the meantime I decided I would like to observe this ritual, so, a few days ahead of time, I asked the coordinator if I could watch and record it, explaining my interest as an anthropologist and as a parent who didn't know how to carry out this important parental duty. She agreed.

During the weeks before the festa, I observed a small log, with a face painted on the cut end, propped up on two legs, on a low table in the entrance hall. The log was wrapped in a blanket and wore a homemade version of a red barretina, the traditional peasant hat and symbol of Catalan identity. Two bowls lay in front of the Tió, one with water, and the other with food such as bread or carrots. A week away from the festa, the first log was replaced by a much larger one. Apparently the diet was having the desired effect.

Second Tió

Third Tió


When I dropped off my daughter the morning of the festa, we saw a third log, even bigger than the second. Returning for the festa, the Tió had been moved into one of the playrooms and placed on a low table. The children were gathered and each given a stick. Miraculously, no one lost an eye. Would day care personnel in the US take this risk? The Tió was then completely covered with a large blanket and the children were taken out to the entrance hall to dip their sticks in a bucket of water. I suspected this act held some symbolic importance. When I asked about it later, the educator told me that it was just an excuse to get the children out of the room.



When the children returned, they gathered in a circle around the Tió and began whacking it. Again no eyes were poked out. The educators led them in the song they had been learning and those old enough to sing joined in as they rhythmically whacked the Tió:

Caga Tió
Avellanas i torró
No cagis arengades
Que són massa salades
Caga turrons
Que són més bons!

Shit Log,
Hazelnuts and turron (an almond-based confection typically eaten at Christmas)
Don’t shit herrings
That are too salty
Shit turrons
That are the best!

At this point the whacking ceased, the blanket was pulled back and gifts and treats were revealed under the Tió and distributed to all the children.



The festa del Tió is only practiced in Catalunya. Papa Noel (Santa Claus) and/or the Three Kings bring presents to children in other parts of Spain. It is true that food may be left for them but these do not produce gifts by means of digestive processes. The Tió or its image is encountered everywhere from shop windows to newspapers to libraries to holiday advertising and educational websites. During the nights before Christmas, live and animated versions of the festa del Tió and different renditions of the song have been featured on televised evening news. It is not a marginalized tradition. Some Catalans are aware that outsiders might find the Tió strange or vulgar but they don't seem to be at all embarrassed.

I have encountered different text versions of the songs I heard and other variants containing diverse elements. Many of the songs contain the threat to beat the log if it doesn’t shit; others demand that it shit all sorts of things in addition to the traditional turron and nuts from chocolate to money to pumpkins and to piss white wine. A few demand that if the log has nothing to shit it should let a resounding fart. But all of them enjoin the log to shit. The Tió is traditionally oak, the sacred tree of pagan Europe and the festa del Tió appears to be related to other winter solstice sacrificial rites such as those involving the Yule log, the Christmas tree, the piñata (and the cross of the crucifixion?). In the past, the Tió was burned in the hearth to provide the additional gifts of light and warmth but few urban dwellings have fireplaces today. What is distinct about it is the graphic emphasis on defecation.



This emphasis might be written off as no more than an odd quirk except that, and I won’t sugarcoat this, Catalan Christmas involves a lot more shit.



On the evening of Santa Llucia, December 13, a large pessebre (model nativity scene) was unveiled in the Plaça de la Vila, in front of the town hall here in Vilanova i la Geltrú. With the temperature in the 30s, singing a few carols was deemed sufficient and then the light went on in the octagonal kiosk revealing the elaborate and beautifully rendered nativity scene. On one side Josep i Mari recuperated in a manger with the newborn baby Jesús. On the other side, the angel announced its good news to the shepherds tending their flocks by a lake of real water. Down from the mountains rode the three kings on their camels, bearing lavish gifts. Majestic palms rose up in the foreground and lush farmlands stretched back towards a town in the foothills of the mountains. And in the center distance by the side of the road, a peasant, partly concealed behind a bush, was squatting with his pants down, the dark product of his exertion coiled on the ground.




As people crowded around to admire the pessebre, a man directly in front of me carrying a small child said, Mira, el caganer (Look, the shitter). Que fa? the child asked, (what is he doing). Fa caca. Es el caganer, said the father (he’s shitting. He’s the shitter).



In the middle ages only churches constructed pessebres. Wealthy families followed suit, many already had private chapels so they wouldn’t have to mix with the townsfolk. Nowadays, many people make and display their own pessebres and they do not buy them ready-made but collect the figures and accessories over time and assemble their own installations. Many towns have associations of pessebre enthusiasts who give classes and mount exhibitions. If you have ever seen the model train landscapes some people in the US have poured their weekends into, you can get an idea of how elaborate these can be.

The pessebre does engage the hobbyist tendency but it is also a sacred offering to the divine. A Catalan proverb says, A qui pessebre fa, no li manca pa, whoever makes a pessebre, will not lack bread. In addition to the gifts people give each other, the reciprocal nature of the gift is emphasized in many elements of the winter festival cycle: the Tió is given food and shits gifts, the caganer shits so that food will grow, the three kings bring gifts of homage, God sacrificed his son to cancel the sins of humanity, and Santa Llucia sacrificed her eyes for the return of the light. The activity people dedicate to these observances: from mounting pastorets (nativity plays), building pessebres, singing cançons de Nadal, feeding guests, delighting children, hanging greens or adorning a tree, are all offerings of a sort.

Walking around town I saw pessebres in many shop windows. Some were rather basic and thrown together, some elaborate, some elegant. The landscape of a bakery’s pessebre was made of bread. Only a few lacked a caganer but the caganer is not always easy to spot. Typically the caganer is not the center of attention but is placed in an inconspicuous place such as behind a tree or bush. The caganer appears to be concealed from the other figures in the pessebre but is not hidden from the human observer. A holiday card I found attested:



A tot Pessebre hi ha d’haver amagat un Caganer. (Roughly: Every nativity scene conceals a shitter). It is a view that may be socially enforced.

The politics of shitting

This year the official pessebre in the city of Barcelona did not have a caganer. According to the association Amics del Caganer (Friends of the Shitter) “The Parks and Gardens staff said that it is better not to display a caganer because the caganer violates municipal ordinances that prohibit doing one’s business in a public way.” A major newspaper, La Vanguardia, published a series of polemical letters. The first writer asserted, “A nativity scene without a caganer is not a nativity scene” and ridiculed the position of the parks department for thinking the public would confuse a clay figure with a human being. A second writer offered a win-win solution. He suggested including the caganer but also placing a figure of a police officer with a pen and clipboard next to him, writing a ticket for the infraction. The writer said this would achieve three objectives: respect tradition, comply with the ordinance and educate the public about how it is being reinforced, and finally, demonstrate how important it is to respect the law. Finally, the head of Parks and Gardens publicly denied prohibiting the caganer in the first place, saying that it was the artistic decision of the artist commissioned by the city to design and install the pessebre.



The politics of shitting far exceed the issue of municipal ordinances. I have described the traditional caganer, still the favorite, as a pagès (peasant), most often with a red barretina marking him as Catalan. This figure goes back many centuries. There is little written documentation but a gargoyle on Barcelona’s gothic cathedral depicting a caganer in a barretina dates the figure, but not necessarily it’s connection to Christmas, to the fourteenth century. In addition to these caganers vells (old caganers) there are also the caganers nous (new caganers). Since the 19th century these have included figures of nuns and priests. In the past few decades, caganers have depicted a broad variety of figures especially famous people such as the Pope, sports and movie stars and political leaders of every stripe. This year there was a George Bush caganer, squatting as he gripped the globe under his arm. There is currently an exposition in our local library of over 100 caganers. At the Fira de Santa Llucia (Christmas market) in Barcelona, hundreds of booths display pessebre-making elements including rows upon rows of squatting caganers.






Newspaper articles note who was depicted each year and those chosen must be good sports about it yet it is an ambiguous honor. I’ve asked a number of people about caganers and the most common explanation is that the caganer represents the Catalan people’s agricultural roots and that his shit fertilizes the soil so that the crops will grow well in the coming year. Traditions about the cycle of shit and food may be found in many peasant traditions. Another informant told me that the fertilizer story is just an excuse to hide the real reason: that the caganer expresses anti-clerical sentiment.



The preponderance of figures depicting defecating nuns, priests and pontiffs suggests that there is some truth to this. It can also be said that Spanish society in general is highly anti-clerical. Having endured forty years of a dictatorship closely linked to and supported by the Catholic Church, it is not surprising that many Spaniards will never enter a church and prefer to celebrate their traditional religious festivals in the street. One informant told me that the churches would be empty except for old people and Latin American immigrants. According to a recent news article, the majority of marriages in Catalunya are now civil unions. The same informant told me that, of those who do wed in church, it’s often because “many young women aren’t religious but they have a romantic image of the church wedding. But many of the wedding guests wait outside, they won’t go in.”



Defecation can be seen as leveling: a lowly act that even the powerful and pious must commit. This is another popular explanation of the caganer. As such, the depiction of famous people and politicians is congruent with the treatment of religious figures. The medieval feast of fools common throughout Europe was also practiced during the Christmas season. During that holiday social roles were reversed, there was a boy pope, the boss had to sweep the floor, and the church was taken over by the people who mocked the liturgy with a ribald parody that sometimes included scatological acts and substances. Perhaps the Tió and the caganer descend from this tradition or at least recycle its vocabulary.



There is also a play on hidden shit in the sense of dirty laundry. To reveal a public figure’s hidden shit then, is to expose not only their misdeeds but also their vulnerability. After all, they are depicted with their pants down.

Then there is the question of the incursion of Santa Claus, known in Spain as Papa Noel or Pare Noël in Catalan. Half of the population of Cataluyna comes from other parts of Spain or other parts of the world so it’s not surprising that Papa Noel is also a major presence here. Thinking about my advisor, Stanley Brandes’ study of Mexico’s Day of the Dead and the angry opposition of some Mexicans to the infiltration of the US version of Halloween in Mexico, I asked a friend, “How do el Tió and Papa Noel get along?” She paused and said “very well.” I reflected that perhaps because the Tió enjoys hegemonic authority here, he isn’t threatened by other traditions. But then I saw a news story about a Catalan town that had mounted a campaign for the fourth consecutive year to “Shit on Santa Claus” and that this year they would introduce a new activity, namely to “Piss on Santa Claus.” In general however, most Catalans seem to have an ecumenical attitude.



The Tió and the caganer suggest numerous resonances. Both play on acts of concealment and revelation with social-political, theological and physiological dimensions. Shitting in these cases is figurative/symbolic but it is also an embodied experience that engages the senses in a particular way. Does the act of defecation mimic the act of birthing, hence the association with the nativity? Given the peasant’s generative view of shit, is the gift of feces to the crops a reciprocal act for the gift of Jesus to humanity? Does whacking the Tió emulate the suffering of Jesus?

In the US, children’s scatological folklore is passed among themselves, generally prohibited by adults, but here the adults are proud to transmit these traditions without euphemisms to their children. Freud suggested that any people who had anuses would have a complex of anal repression and sublimation but many Catalans speak quite opening about bodily functions (even at table) and graphically depict defecation as part of sacred observance.

Children are central to these traditions, and some of the Tió songs demonstrate a relation to toilet training (i.e. “I don’t piss my bed anymore, so shit turrons”). At the same time, when children are taught not to touch something that is bad or dirty, they are told it is “caca.” What specific dispositions do Catalan children learn in relation to defecation and feces and how might this bear on adult social practices and expressive culture? How does learning to deal with shit in these particular ways make one a member of this society?

But enough. The purpose of this blog isn’t to explore these phenomena in a full academic treatment, rather to provide snapshots of the engagement of the senses in Cataluyna. I’d be glad to receive any comments, questions or suggestions.

Here are links to short animations of the caganer and el Tió:
www.amicsdelcaganer.org/scaramuix.htm
www.edu365.com/nadal/img_nadal/cagatio.swf


Please do not distribute, quote or cite. This is an informal communication to my friends about the experience of my field research in progress. In the future I may publish related material but the foregoing text and translations are at best provisional and not intended for publication.