Vila Seca

There are clear benefits to travelling here in January, especially in a small town like Vila Seca where our friend Robert lives, because the streets are quiet, there are no lines anywhere and the shelves in the bakeries are full of doughy things still warm from coming out of the oven next door.

But it is an enormously bigger benefit to travel here in January because you can learn about the famous Catalonian shitting log (or for more sensitive readers, “pooping” log), which was the primary Christmas tradition around here before everything got Americanized.

With roots going back to ancient traditions that I’m going to say originated with frustrated parents trying to figure out a way to get their kids to contribute to maintaining the house by dragging some logs into the house to burn, the shitting log tradition encompasses all of the characteristics we treasure in the holiday season, tenderness, nourishment, violence, shitting and candy.

Around the middle of December, we bring a log into the house and give it a face, then cover it with a blanket so that it doesn’t get cold. For the next couple of weeks, the kids feed it every day by forcing food into its face. Then around Christmas time everyone notices that the log hasn’t um . . . gone to the bathroom despite eating all that food. 

So the kids hit it violently with sticks while singing a song that includes the lyrics “don’t poop hazelnuts that we don’t like, poop nougat,” trying to get its intestines moving a little. The kids then go into another room for a few minutes to concentrate real hard on the topic of what success looks like in this context, and when they return they find that the log has indeed pooped out a pile of turrones, which is kind of like Spanish peanut brittle.

We took a field trip today to the Parc Natural de la Serra de Montsant, which involved some very windy roads and very beautiful views.

And we also found out why it’s best to have a well-defined budget before construction starts to improve the façade of the town church. If you don’t, you may run out of money before the job is done.