Christmas Already

In Spain, there is no Thanksgiving day buffer zone to delay the onset of Christmas. Talk of it began about two weeks ago, at the beginning of November, and the talking has steadily increased since then. I guess that's not too different from the States, but at least I can feel confident to see few lights before the end of the Thanksgiving holiday. Here, not so. Lights are already lit up. A few buildings are putting lights up, but the majority of the displays lighting up so far have been left up from last year. I asked a friend why the city never took them down, to which she replied, "What, all that trouble when you have to put them up again next year? What for?" Ah... Madrid.

Tonight my late classes were cancelled, so I took the free time to shop for a Madrid coat (for me, much lighter than an actual coat), fingernail clippers, and chipotle sauce. Two of the items, the fingernail clippers and the sauce, required that I enter into El Corte Ingles, the mega-huge shopping center that has everything and usually occupies two sides of the street. Fortunately, so far the Holiday shopping crowd is utterly indistinguishable from the normal shopping crowd, which is still so massive and full of tilters (the awkward, unpredictable walkers) that usually about 20 minutes is enough to make me enjoy the relative solace of the metro. While I find it incredible that El Corte Ingles could possibly hold anymore people, I hear that in December it gets much busier. If only I could say I won't go in. It's impossible. It has everything.

And to think I thought it was only in America that ultra capitalism was driving back the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. How false. It's even crazier when you consider that most Spaniards don't exchange gifts on the 25th but wait until Kings Day on the 6th of January.
At least I don't have to be disappointed about missing out on Christmas shopping madness. And it must be madness, because I had only three things to buy tonight, but upon entering El corte I forgot one of them, and now I have a jar of Russian pickles and no fingernail clippers.