Whatever be the cake you give to the ménage, the best part of it will be set aside to offer to the master and mistress and their family. If it be a bull, the head and horns will be kept; if a dragon, the head and tail; and on the evening after the servants’ party, when your dinner is over, the cook will hastily don a white apron and knot her best silk handkerchief round her head, and will march into the dining-room bearing the remains of the cake with all its inedible decorations carefully rearranged to hide what has gone. This she will courteously offer to every one at table, pressing them to taste and see how rich a dish the Señores have provided for the delectation of those in their employ. And as often as not some talented member of the household will stand at the door meanwhile, and sing at the top of his or her voice an improvised couplet setting forth the generosity and amiability of his employers.
Of the actual giving of Christmas parties there is very little. Christmas trees are, of course, quite foreign to the soil, and I have never heard of a Christmas dance, outside of Madrid, save those given by foreign residents. But Christmas Eve is celebrated by high and low, and rich people at this time spend a good deal of money in what seems to us a singular and unpractical method of displaying their religious fervour. This consists in setting up a Nacimiento (Nativity), or representation of the birth of Christ, which is prepared in the private chapel of the house, if there is one, or in a principal reception-room, in as elaborate a form as the means of the family permit.
Even the poorest try to procure something of the kind for their children, and the necessary figures for it are sold in the streets and in the shops for a week or so before the great day, at prices varying from one centime to hundreds of pesetas. I have bought the whole scene modelled in coarse crudely painted clay by the vendor, for a peseta. The stable of such a Nacimiento has three little walls and no roof, the Virgin and St. Joseph kneel on either side of the Babe, two tiny plumes of pampas grass and some cocks and hens represent the rural surroundings which these artists imagine to be appropriate, and, regardless of the Bible story, the beloved St. John as a grown man will be found somewhere in the background. One cannot please a poor family more than by presenting them with a Nacimiento of this class. It will be set up in the place of honour on the chest of drawers, whose top is always devoted to their “saints”—appallingly bad images, as a rule—and family photographs; while, if the exiguous wages permit, one or more candles will be lighted in front of the treasure every night until the “Day of the Kings,” which is our Twelfth Night, a far greater festival to Spanish children than Christmas or New Year’s Day. And the smallest infant is taught that no sacrilegious finger is to be laid on the sacred toy.
The Nacimientos in rich houses are put up with an absolute disregard of cost (I remember seeing one of which a single figure cost £4), but the idea is the same—a plastic representation of the Nativity. Here, however, it is made the occasion of a social function, and it is curious to read in the papers on Christmas Day how a magnificent Nacimiento was set up over-night in the gorgeous chapel of the splendid mansion of the Dukes of Mengano or the Counts of Fulano, and how, after the Reverend Bishop of this or the learned Canon of that had read the Office and delivered an inspired address, the whole family adjourned to the dining-room at 1 a.m. and were regaled with “a succulent lunch,” which was “made the more agreeable by abundance of champán.”
In this country the press reports of functions of this kind are not sparing in their adjectives. The accounts are paid for like any other advertisement, and the rich hosts of the “new” nobility like to have value for their money just as much as do the wealthy merchants and financiers. As for the old rural nobility, they are mostly too much reduced in fortune for display at Christmas or any other time, and if they are still well off, their tastes and traditions are averse from newspaper celebrity, so that reporters have little chance of getting inside their grave old houses, still less of obtaining fees for advertisements in the shape of adulatory narratives of their religious observances.
In Seville all old customs still keep an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination. Of these one of the most curious is a religious ceremony called the “Cock’s Mass” (Misa del Gallo), which takes place on Christmas Eve. So strange is it and so archaic that at one time efforts were made to get the Pope to prohibit it; but the Franciscan Friars of the Monastery of San Buenaventura appealed to him in person; permission was given for a commission of the Brothers to perform the Cock’s Mass at the Vatican, and after hearing it for himself the Pope gave a special licence for its continuance in a slightly modified form.
San Buenaventura is the church to go to on Christmas Eve in Seville if one would hear the Cock’s Mass in its most refined form, with good singing and organ-playing; but for real local colour and a passionate fervour which overflows all the bonds of self-restraint, we must find standing-room, if we can, in the little chapel of San Antonio Abad, in the street called Alfonso XII., for this is the chosen resort of the poor, to whom their religion is as real as their daily bread.
The Mass begins on the stroke of midnight, but hours before that the little church will be occupied by silent worshippers, who kneel on the floor praying, with their eyes fixed on the high altar. Here is displayed the Nativity, and prominent among the figures is a donkey, the pride and glory of the congregation, because it is the only life-sized model of the kind to be seen in any church in Seville.
People drop in every minute or so to look at the Nacimiento, kneel for a short time in prayer, and then go out again to meet their friends and pass the time till the Mass begins. The streets are crowded, and every café and restaurant is full, for people go from one church to another to see the different Nacimientos, and few of them will get to bed before two or three in the morning; so the system must be sustained with coffee and cakes, or wine and ham, or aguardiente and crab claws, or cold water and roasted chestnuts or acorns, according to personal taste and depth of purse.