Los Reyes Magos

So this holiday is the popular winter holiday in Spain. Los Reyes Magos means The Wise Men. January 5th is equivalent to Christmas Eve, when the Wise Men are thought to have brought gifts to Jesus after he was born. January 6th is when the kids get up and open their gifts, so kind of like Christmas. The holiday is celebrated with a huge parade where the three Wise Men and their "servants" go through the streets and throw candy to the kids. People also eat a dessert called roscón. It is a cake like dessert with candied fruit on top. It has an orangey taste to it. Baked into the cake is a little surprise and traditionally whoever gets the surprise in their piece pays for the roscón.

Ben and I got our roscón on the 4th because we didn't know if any bakeries would be open on the 5th. The Spanish are pretty serious about their holidays and if they can have the time off they usually take it. This has been great for Ben and I because then we get a lot of time off too. However, at times it can be frustrating because even the grocery stores will close down! We think you are supposed to eat the roscón on the 5th or 6th but when we bought ours it was still war from being fresh out of the oven so we ate it early.

On the 5th we headed down to the parade. It started at 6:30pm and the place we went to we thought was pretty close to the start. It turned out though that the parade would not reach us until 8pm and we had got there at 5:30 to get a good spot. Well, we definitely  had a good spot but we had to wait for 3 hours. It wasn't too bad. It was entertaining watching parents trying to shove their kids to the front and the other parents at the front getting mad because they had already been standing there with their kids for the last 3 hours or so. One mom made it and pushed ahead of us with her two girls. Of course the girls couldn't see anything still and were crying and complaining and wanted to be picked up. I was laughing telling Ben that the mom was going to exhausted from holding the little girl because she still had a good 2 hours before the parade came by us! After waiting for an hour and half the girls were still too upset so they left. All that pushing and crying for nothing!

During the parade, the people on the floats and the wise men through out candy to everyone. It is estimated that 700 kilograms or 1543 pounds of hard candy gets tossed out to parade watchers! That is a lot of candy! Although when you spread that out over half a million viewers I guess it isn't that much. Ben was able to catch some of it in the air but if we didn't catch it we weren't going to get any. Once it hit the ground, kids and adults alike were down on their knees scrambling to get the candy.

After the parade there were some fireworks. It was pretty fun!


Roscón:

:

A lot of the roscónes we saw had a whip cream like filling. The one we bought didn't have that so we got our own.

I found the little surprise in my piece.

This bakery had so many of them!

Lining up waiting for the parade to start.

A lot of families brought step ladders and stools for their kids to stand on.

We were in plaza cibeles to watch the parade.

And it finally started!!

Some people were using umbrellas to catch the candy.

The Wizard of Oz.

Peter Pan.

This lady was so cool. Somewhere people were holding onto the wires connected to her balloon and while she went down the street they kept her pretty far up in the air but then they would bring her down over the crowds almost close enough to high-five people!

Wise King #1

Wise King #2

Wise King #3, The Black One. Ben has heard from a few different people that the most popular Wise King in Spain is the black one. (I didn't get a good picture because they went crazy with the candy throwing at this point and everyone around me was pushing and shoving and waving their hands in air.)

The camels carried 'gifts' on their backs for baby Jesus.

I got this picture of the internet. Notice anything odd about the "black" wise man?