Not Unplugged: Christmas in Barcelona

And an editorial battle lost

Photo by Stefano Buonamici for The New York Times

One of my goals for the new year is to increase the frequency of this newsletter to once a week. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be traveling more than my standard one trip per month (having tragically failed, once again. to win El Gordo today). But I will be supplementing those adventures in uplugged time and space with other kinds of pieces. There will be some how-tos, for example, on traveling without the internet, And I’ll be dusting off some of my older published to look behind the scenes at how the proverbial sausage got made, and how I found moments of serendipity in even the most well-planned journeys.

Because the holidays are upon us, I thought I’d test the latter idea with a piece I wrote for The New York Times awhile back. It’s about Barcelona, Christmas, and shit.

You’ll note that the headline doesn’t actually say that. Pity my poor editor at the travel section who received a draft with references to excrement liberally, um, scattered throughout.

Here for example, is my original opening paragraph: Like so many things in life—soccer, sex, pigs’ feet with snails—Christmas is better in Barcelona. Not for the Catalans the cheap tinsel, the plastic-wrapped canes, the celebrity reindeer with his bleating nose. No, Christmas in Barcelona is an altogether sleeker affair, whimsical and exotic in equal measure. The lights lining the broad avenues are more artistic, the parades are better choreographed, the cakes more elaborate, the stories more magical. Plus, there is (and you will please believe me when I say there is really no other way of putting this) just enough shit to keep things grounded.

Ah, but there was another way of putting it.

This particular editor and I have worked together for nearly 20 years, and I adore her. She inevitably make my pieces much better, and when I occasionally push back on one of her suggestions, she usually comes up with a solution that works for both of us. But she does have The New York Times’ standards to uphold, and it turns out that they do not include heavy doses of fecal matter in the travel section.

And yet, it was shit that had given me the idea for the trip in the first place. When I pitched the story, I had only recently learned about the caganers, little figurines that squat, bare-assed, with a neat little turd at their feet in every Catalan nativity scene. I knew that caganers were meant to be an irreverent, even semi-subversive, reminder of our basic human natures; that even in the moments of the most divine transcendence—when Jesus himself is being born—someone still has to take a dump.

When I got the assignment and started planning the trip, the first person I contacted was the president of the Association of Friends of the Caganer. Joan Lluirets and I met at a nativity scene in the Barri Gótic, and walked from there to a gallery where 400 caganers were on display. As we talked, Joan filled me in on the history of the little pooping men. I learned, for example, that although they traditionally take the form of 18th-century peasants, it’s also now common for caganers to look like celebrities (Donald Trump is especially popular this year).

I also learned that the Catalan association between Christmas and shit went far further than I was previously aware. Joan told me about the Caga Tió, for example, which is kind of like a piñata, if piñatas were made to look like anthropomorphic logs that “shit” candy when beaten. He also tipped me off to a market I shouldn’t miss with a hint I couldn’t ignore:

As I was about to leave, Lliurets called me back. “Are you going to the Diagonal market tonight?” I told him I hadn’t heard of it. “Go around midnight, and look for the candy stalls, he said. “And you’ll see. We Catalans are the most scatological people in the world.”

It didn’t take me long to figure out what Joan meant. Most of the stalls at the market were for junky plastic toys, but there were also a couple of lurid candy vendors, their shelves overflowing with the swirling colors of plate-sized lollipops and long snakes of taffy. And wedged among them:

In a corner, stacked in neat rows, were pink and blue styrofoam bowls containing, well, shit. Candy shit. Amazingly lifelike candy shit. “Two euros,” said the vendor, mistaking my revulsion for consumer interest.

None of that—not the Caga Tió, not the bowls of candy shit, not even Joan’s killer quote about the scatalogical Catalans—made it into the final story. I tried every synonym I could think of, from the obscure (ordure) to the infantile (dookie). I marshalled every ethnographic article I could find on Catalan Power Relations and the Grotesque Body. But it was to no avail. On this, my editor wasn’t budging. There’s only so much crap New York Times readers can tolerate in their Sunday paper.

I still like the piece. Maybe even more, in fact, because I know that behind the story that made it into the paper was another story, one illuminated for me like the Christmas lights on Via Laietana, by one unlikely comment from a former stranger.

That’s it from me for 2024. Wishing all of you the best kind of adventures in the coming year.

Lisa

More Unplugged

Not sick of me yet? You can read more of my thoughts on unplugged travel in the interview I did this fall with fellow adventurer Samantha Childress for her newsletter Caravanserai. Or check out this piece by Laura Hall for Adventure.com.