Christmas the Spanish way (well Spain-glish)

Welcome to today's Christmas around the world post. This is part of a series of post on different blogs organised by Living Life Intentionally.  Click on the logo to take her introduction of the series plus links to all the other blogs (there's also a free e book of activities).

 

Today we're visiting Spain. As regular readers of the blog know we're a bilingual and bicultural family as The Papa is Spanish. Here is some of the ways we add a Spanish element to our Christmas (so it's more Span-glish!)

The Nativity scene or Belen (literally 'Bethlehem'). In Spain the traditional nativity includes a lot more than just Mary, Joseph, Jesus, shepherds, angel and kings. The whole town is included - craftsmen, bakers, washer women, children... the lot. We've got several Belenes in our house, two which we got when we got married and one which I made for the children to play with earlier this year. See how I made it. Perhaps I need to add more characters to our new Belen! 

The giving of presents doesn't happen on the 25th Dec as in the UK. Instead 'Los Reyes' (The 3 Kings) bring presents on the 6th Jan. Children leave their slippers under the tree. If they have been good that year in the morning they are filled with presents  (if not they wake up to coal!) In our family we give the children their big presents at Christmas and have a few more stocking fillers on Reyes.

At Reyes a special crown shaped sweet bread is eaten. We based our recipe on the one from the Spanish food blog La Manzana dulche de Eva. Here's how we made ours