Weird World Culture: El Caganer

One of the greatest things about being a Wide Body Jetsetter is the wide variety of travel adventures I get to have. Make no mistake; I’m not one of those “adventure travelers” who climb bloody rocks and crap in the woods for fun. By ‘travel adventures’ I mean: I’m the type who slowly meanders on-and-off the beaten byways of Europe, looking for new beer, new junk food, and new kinds of people and cultures. So I can make fun of them.

Not the food and beer, mind you; I have nothing but respect for those things. It’s the various weirdly fucks and their bizarre cultural quirks that give me a smile, a chuckle, and a snicker. Way before I was a Wide Body Jetsetter, back when I was a thin high school geek who had never been on a plane, me and the boys giggled about poop jokes, as pubescent geeks do. And farts. Oh the joy which spreads upon the face of silly boys upon the explosion of a good gutbuster. But imagine my surprise when, as a Wide Man Walking in Barcelona, I came upon HIM.

EL.

EL CAGANER.

And some things cannot be unseen. 

Barthelona

We were wandering through a Christmas Market in Barcelona one cool and sunny day. The fact that it’s cool and sunny in Spain around Christmas is an excellent reason to go to Spain. Or Australia. I think I had consumed my 5^th or 6^th tall can of Estrella thervetha on a park bench, and I was practicing my Spanish lisp. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Mexicans say ‘cerveza’ and millions of Spaniards (Catalonians, probably; don’t quote me) pronounce it in a very queer way: ‘thervetha.’ And BarTHelona. Etc., etc., ad nausea. Just add nausea. 10 tall cans of thervetha ought to do it.

Then the little woman appeared after shopping and dragged my drunk, lisping ass to yet another shopping experience: the Xmas market. I was totally down for that. It was either get moving or fall asleep on the park bench. After my ridiculous language lesson (self-imposed), I was totally ready for some chestnuts roasting on the open fire.

EL CAGANER

What I was definitely not ready for was EL CAGANER. El Caganer is like El Mariachi, only uglier and smellier. El Caganer likes to hide and wait for unsuspecting tourists to waddle by, then he drops his pants to let slip the dogs of poo. No one is safe; men, women, and children suffer his deadly doodie. Well, the kids mostly chuckle.

I didn’t find any chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and Jack Frost was nowhere to be seen. But there were nativity scenes aplenty, all over the market square. They had full villages in miniature, full of peasant figurines, donkey figurines, and manger figurines. The little ceramic figures were straight from El Biblio: the 3 wise hombres, a manger, Mary, and the little bambino Hey-Zeus.

And just around the corner, I saw the little figurine which can’t be unseen: El Caganer was squatting behind the manager, dropping trou and poo—within pissing distance of Baby Jesus! WTF? There he was, about as out of place as an asshole on the elbow, porcelain butt out, delivering a prodigious poo.

It was the transgressive thrill of having the strict dogma of religion sullied by this blasphemous image of a crapping figure of a Spanish peasant, no doubt some sort of heathen/pagan. It was that non sequitur moment where the holy meets the obscene, like that Piss Christ art by Andres Serrano.

But it was also the graphic nature of the porcelain poo. It wasn’t all cute like a poop emoji with a smile, deposited under the buttocks of the blasphemer. Nossirree Bob. It was hanging, all-squidgy-like, caught in flagrante, as it were.

But Wait! There’s More!

What could deliver such a visceral attraction/repulsion than El Caganer? A whole army of Los Caganers, in a Spanish market square, lined up like ducks in a row at a county fair. Naturally, you can buy your own trinkets at a Christmas market, and all the figurines needed to make your own home Nativity scene. You can buy wise men of every color, size, and stripe, with many variations of Mary and Baby Jesus.

But you already knew the most popular figurine in the Spanish Nativity: El Caganer. That’s right, folks, people lined up in droves to buy the shitty little figurines, and peddlers were turning a brisk trade. You could buy the ‘original’ Catalonian Caganer, dressed in red and white peasant clothes, or any matter of other Caganer you can imagine. This shitty little bastard takes many forms, including celebrity Caganers, Politician Caganers, young Caganers, old Caganers, black ones, brown ones, and red ones (skin and poo).

This was starting to look like a fecal fetish. Wait. Were we in Germany? No scheisse videos to be seen anywhere, but we did see an Angela Merkel figurine doing some scheissemachen. Even Obama brought his Presidential black booty to the lineup of famous politician Caganers. And he was smiling something fierce.

The Tao of Poo

El Caganer isn't just an irreverent little shit copping a squat behind the holiest of holy scenes in Christendom. Nossiree, Bob. There's a reason for his squeezin. That's right, there's an entire philosophy behind the buttockal blasphemy. But of course there is.

While the Brits devote entire libraries of literature and comedy series devoted to bum jokes and poo humor, we Puritanical Americans bury the basic crudity of rude bodily function under mountains, heaps, and piles (as it were) of euphemism. As if living in constant fear of biblical plagues (as puritans do), some are so afraid of saying 'bowel movement' that they say 'b.m.' as a euphemism for the clinical term. Talk about some tight-ass motherfuckers.

Fortunately for America, our only saving grace is the cousin of El Caganer, Mr. Hanky. Otherwise, we would be lost.

Rather than hiding the poo or burying it under dunghills of euphemism, the Spaniards embrace the Tao of Poo, understanding that the complete biological process of eat/drink/pray/love/shit is also a religious experience. To wit:

Menja bé, caga fort i no tinguis por a la mort!

Eat well, shit heartily, and don't be afraid of death!

And those saucy Spaniards would say this before a meal. Gotta lovem, those tapa-munchin' munchkins.

They would also wish us a Feliz navidad! And my wide ass would also like to wish you happy holidays, whatever form they may take for you. And howdy ho!

50 Shades of Czech Easter

Annual Ass-Whipping for Fun and Fabulous Prizes...

In the Western time-honored Easter tradition, children flock to the green gardens of suburbia in search of colored Easter eggs. Meanwhile, in Czechia, boys gather willow branches, weave them into switches, and chase women through the streets until they catch them and whip their butts reeeeeaaaallll gooooood. And the women give them colored Easter eggs and candy for the effort.

“It's a pagan fertility ritual!” squealed my hippy-dippy California friend when he visited me in Prague in 1998. There was some truth in his wild guess. Most pagan seasonal rituals were eclipsed by the Mighty Church in an effort to quash them by substituting religious celebrations in their place. Both Christmas and Easter coincide with the pagan celestial celebrations of the winter solstice and the spring equinox. And that is not a coincidence.

More Easter Than Most Countries

In the West, we get a couple of days off to celebrate Good Friday and Easter Sunday. But in the grand old tradition of taking it easy and enjoying life, select Europeans get extra Easter holidays. They've got Ugly Wednesday, Green Thursday, Good Friday, White Saturday, Easter Sunday, and Easter Monday. All they need is Fat Tuesday and a bit of jazz and it could be Mardi Gras.

My wife and I took advantage of the long weekend to leave Prague and spend time pursuing one of my favorite pastimes: eating fried cheese and drinking beer in castle pubs. For all of these events to come to pass, all planets in the cosmos must align properly. And in the sleepy medieval town of Loket, all portents pointed to pleasure and I got my wish.

What Is the Meaning of This?

Be good and beat some butts!

The boys and men take great care in selecting willow branches with just the right bend and just the right 'spring' in the wood. They must be supple enough to be twisted and woven into braided whips capable of beating eggs out of the most resilient of booties. The ends of the whip are decorated with colorful ribbons, and the finished Easter Excalibur is called pomlázka. If the boys are all thumbs or too lazy to climb a tree, they can always buy them pre-assembled by senior citizens trying to make a buck.

Next they take to the streets in search of butts to beat. When they find a girl, they chant “Hody, hody doprovody, dejte vejce malovaný, nedáte-li malovaný, dejte aspoň bílý, slepička vám snese jiný…” which means 'Give me all your eggs and I'll return the favor by beating your bum with this here switch o' mine. Oh, and those eggs better be colored as well.' This is not assault, nossiree Bob. Recipients of the ritual beatings bear not only light red welts on their buttockal regions, they will also receive blessings of health and fertility. Traditionally, girls who did not get threatened at whip-point for their precious eggs felt neglected, undesirable, and were forced to join a convent. Holidays are harsh.

A Village Easter Monday Bristling With Whips and Wicker Baskets

Hold your whip higher, son. 

Up until last weekend, I'd never witnessed this ritual firsthand. Mainly because these secret pagan traditions are nowadays only practiced in small towns and villages, away from big cities and the prying evil eye of political correctness, cultural condescension, and general assault charges.

We stomped around Castle Loket on Easter Sunday, I ate my smaženy sýr and drank my castle beer, and I got some wicked castle shots for the old photo archive. Easter Monday we checked out of the B&B and embarked on a casual walkabout of the old village for a few hours before heading over to Karlovy Vary, then homeward.

The first punters presented themselves. Three Czech boys in their late teens swung their pomlázky like gunslingers at high noon. They sniffed, snorted, grunted, giggled, swigged their beers, and checked their smartphones. Hell, they're teens after all. Maybe they had a booty map app.

Young Whippersnappers

As we winded on down the road toward the village bus stop, we saw several boys ranging in age from 8 to 18, all armed to the teeth with whips and grins. Most of them carried wicker baskets full of colorful eggs plundered from village booties. But not a girl in sight anywhere. Were they hiding in their cottages with pillows on their sore rumps? Did they all become feminists overnight and start whipping boys' butts in revenge?

I didn't stay long enough to stalk the girls and ask them to comment for my bloggy-woggy. Instead, we switched venues to view another form of cultural oddity known as Karlovy Vary. It's not just a Czech spa town, the home of a film festival, and the source of Becherovka. It's also a weird kind of hybrid of Moscow and Hollywood, where uber-rich New Russians buy gaudy jewelry from store windows and prance about like Stalin's stallions.

But that's a story for another day...

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photo: Gabriela Sarževská

When the Wide Body Jetsetter isn't busy eating fried cheese in castles and practicing Easter whip fu, he makes a modest living as a professional photographer and a freelance writer, which seems to explain an awful lot.

Mikuláš Day in the Czech Republic

Annual License to Legally Torture Your Children in Public With Impunity

I've seen some pretty bizarre cultural rituals on this global journey o' mine. Rarely do they warrant intervention by some sort of child protective services entity (like the time I heard an American mother threaten her child while in line in the supermarket: STOP IT NOW OR I WILL SLAP THE BLACK OFF OF YOU!!!) But when they do, you can only sit back, watch, and enjoy the show. Um, unless you like children or something.

Every year in the Czech Republic, they have been torturing their children in public for hundreds of years when Mikuláš hits the streets with his hoary host.

It seems innocuous enough to the outsider: an evening wherein people don seasonal costumes and take to the streets. But the seedy underbelly of this fluffy tradition lies hidden to all but the most cynical. In the West you've got a jolly fat man in red clothing checking his list (his accountant checks it twice) to find out if you are naughty or nice. Then you get presents. If your parents aren't cheap bastards.

But in the East, the story is a bit more convoluted. You've got your saint (Mikuláš, pronounced 'Mee-koo-losh'), you've got your angel, and you've got your devil. What? The devil? What the devil? I'm sure my Czech wife explained the traditions to me until my eyes glassed over and I started dreaming of pizza or something, but I don't know WTF this is all about. Yes, I could Google it, but what does Google know that my wife doesn't?  Plus, the viewpoint of the culturally ignorant is far more entertaining.

The erstwhile Czech Santa, known as Saint Mikuláš (Nicholas?) is a tall chappy in a Pope hat. After he shits in the woods, he staggers, drunk on cheap Czech beer, down to meet his pals, a real motley crew: an angel (usually a female) and a devil (usuallly a middle aged man drunker than a monk).

Mikuláš, the angel and the devil appear every December 5^th and troll the streets looking for children to torture. The angel calms the child down and whispers happy horseshit into its ear, while the devil, a soot-faced malcontent with horns and a curly-haired wig* creeps up behind the child, holds a burlap sack over its head and threatens to kidnap him. Mikuláš just stands tall, watching the torture, the twisted fuck. Perhaps he will intervene in the case of a tie.

And the tears begin to flow. The child, caught between Heaven and Hell, candy sweet nothings, a burlap sack and a job in the iPhone factory in China, lets go with real, genuine tears of fear. And the parents—usually the mother—stands behind the child and GRINS FROM EAR TO EAR. It is the only time I have born witness to child abuse in public treated like a gameshow.

It must be some kind of revenge ritual. There can be no other logical explanation.

Mother to child: 'Do you remember all the times this year that you balled up your little fists, shook til you were red in the face, and let go with screams of defiance so loud that every single person in the entire shopping mall spun their heads and looked at me as if I were the worst mother on the entire planet? Yeah? Well, this is my sweet revenge, you little shitbag.'

ACTUAL TEARS FOR FEARS (look at that boo-boo lip) --->

If only they performed this ritual in Berlin. JAYzus H. Lapdancing Christ, they have some of the most spoiled children on the planet over there. Where is Der Teufel when you need him?

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*Czechs have the some of the straightest hair on Earth. Perhaps they were invaded by curly-haired Celts and were so scarred that it altered their very mythology.

photos by Gabriela Sarževská