Happy Fall!

I suppose all of you back home are busy preparing for Thanksgiving - traveling to see loved-ones, buying all the yukons, yams, cranberries, green beans and fat, juicy Butterballs (or WillyBirds) you can get your grubby little hands on.  Maybe  you've been watching American football or jumping in piles of autumn leaves.

Ah, how I miss the smell of autumn leaves.  There are no trees in Barcelona, or very few, and thus no leaves.  Tis strange. 

Christmas is indeed on it's way, yet they don't even celebrate Santa Claus here, can you believe it!?!  The songs we sung as kids about Santa going all over the world to deliver presents were lies!  I'm still in shock.

Here, the Catalans celebrate Caga Tio, which translates to "Pooing Log" or "Shitting Stick".  Yes, you read that correctly.  This unbelievable Christmas tradition warrants a blog post of it's own.  Stay tuned.

In Barcelona, you know it's Fall when....

  

Panellets, marzipan covered with pine nuts, appear in the pastry shops. !Que rico!

Little huts where people sell baked yams and chestnuts roasted over an open flame, crop up on the street:

Well maybe the smell of warm yams and chestnuts is nice enough to compete with that of autumn leaves.

And the trendy girls put on their summer short shorts over tights when it's freezing cold outside! I realize this is a major trend happening all over the world (at least my sources have confirmed sightings in Tokyo, San Paulo, the East Village, Houston and San Francisco), but frankly, I don't get the concept.  It's cold!  Cover yourself up!

  

Or maybe I'm just jealous. As a clothes-hoarder, I've saved a pair of roll-up jean shorts since 1992 for a fashion occasion such as this, but now they are locked up tight in my storage unit far away.  Oh well.

Happy Fall!