Reyes Magos

Sooo I know that the Christmas season has already passed, at home and here in Spain, but just for the sake of posting about stuff that is cool around town and what we're doing, I wanted to share this little diddy.

Jussssttt before we left for Morocco, Spain celebrated their Christmas equivalent, Los Reyes Magos.  Even though they kinda, sorta, but not really celebrate Christmas on the 25th as well, Los Reyes Magos is the big winter holiday.  All the little Spanish kids write letters to the 3 Kings telling them what they want for "Christmas" (I mean Reyes Magos) and of course if they've been good boys and girls, they get their presents!  It kind of makes sense that the 3 kings/wise men bring the kids gifts instead of Santa Clause because I don't remember baby Jesus getting a visit from a big fat guy in a red suit...  who knows? maybe one of the wise men was fat and wore red? We'll know one day I'm sure.

 ???This is normally where I might put a picture of something I thought was funny and photo-shopped a picture of Santa Clause with my face in the Nativity scene but I found it to be too tedious and I wasn't sure if it would have been sacrilegious or not... so instead here's a pic from photo booth???

The 6th of January is full of presents, food, Spanish treats, parades, and lots of crappy candy.

There were lots of parades going on around town the day before and I missed out on the candy, so Emma and I knew we had to see the big parade on the 6th!  We walked around town for an hour or so in search of the parade, didn't find it, and went home for a quick break....  THEN.... when we went back out for a second try, we saw tons of kids walking in the opposite direction with bags fullll of candy!!  We missed it!!!!

The mobs of people walking past us, taunting us with their bags of candy.

We stumbled upon some great new areas for taking walks while in search of parades.

Making of a good scary movie.  This is also a good symbol of how we felt having missed the parade...

This is us being cheered up even though we didn't find the parade..... Thanks to our self timer, we could cherrish these moments forever.

JUST KIDDING.....  we really thought we missed the parade, so we headed to the grocery store "El Corte Ingles" to pick up some dinner and when we came back outside, we stumbled upon this massive mob of people filling the streets.  We couldn't have made it home even if we tried. 

These "shepherds" look like they need to be put down..... as in the same way you'd put down a zombie.

The floats of the parade weren't your typical Christmas floats, even though there were a few "middle eastern" themed floats with several big floats reserved for the 3 kings.  You won't find and Frostys or Rudolphs here... but below you will find some of our favorites from the night!

Alice.

Pirates and Mermaids.

maybe a Harry Potter float???  or aliens/rockets/tinmen

Memoirs of a Geisha.

It's crazy how frantic people get when the candy throwing starts.  Pictures don't do justice to the 40 yr old men crawling around on the ground and elbowing us in the face multiple times to get to that cough drop.
But we were soooo happy to be going home with a raw chicken and tons of menthol candy!!!!!! (and a pack of cheetos and some weird fruit chews)

Taking home the candy!

We wondered why we saw people with grocery bags on their shoes...........

The streets were sticky for a good 2 days.  and my shoes were for about 5..