Spanish views from a small town

In old times far away, each gender had its important role in society. Those who complied were accepted as a useful cog. Those who did not were considered outsiders and generally shunned as a possible blight on the rest of the group. A women had the role of being mother and wife. That was considered the role she should fulfill within society. Therefore, the woman who was not married and had no children was believed to be anti-natural. As well as the one who had problems assimilating into society. Nothing good could come of that woman, and popular culture turned her into a witch. And so our cultural representation of a witch as a hunchbacked, ugly old woman with no husband or child, whose closest friend is a farm animal or the handy cat that catches the pesky mice. Of course, we now understand that different walks of life are fine, and that each of us plays a necessary role in society even if we don't marry and have children. And that psychiatric problems are treatable and can ...

A person who says they're not superstitious is lying if they are saying it on New Year's Day. Very, very few people exist in Spain who have never tried to eat twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Or gum drops, or mandarin wedges, or anything else that can be eaten in twelve small pieces. Then there are those who scoff at black cats, yet wear red underwear to usher in the new year. That's just a couple of the more common, automatic, superstitions.  The red underwear was imported from Italy. The twelve grapes is purely Spanish. It began at the end of the nineteenth century. At first it was a private, bourgeois affair. The well-to-do middle class of Madrid would eat grapes and drink champagne in the evening on New Year's Eve. Apparently it was a custom imported from France and Germany. At that time it was the custom for madrileños of mostly the lower classes to go out and "search for the Magi" on the fifth of January. It was mostly an...