He’s doing what?!

Who was it who first had the idea to put a ****ing man in the na­tiv­ity scene? Who is re­spon­si­ble for look­ing at that sa­cred rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Jesus’ birth, the faces of Mary, Joseph, the three wise men, the don­key and even the baby Jesus him­self – the man who would come to be known as a prophet, the son of god, and all the other ep­i­thets that have been be­stowed upon him – and said “You know what? There’s some­thing miss­ing here.” And then went on to de­cide that the thing that was ac­tu­ally miss­ing from that most deeply re­li­gious of scenes was a man in a Cata­lan hat drop­ping his pants and defe­cat­ing in the cor­ner, just a few me­tres from the crib?

Now the fact that this seem­ingly highly dis­turbed in­di­vid­ual ex­isted, for he or she clearly did, given the fact that the ca­ganer fig­ure re­ally does exist, could be ex­plained away by some kind of crazed de­sire to re­ally of­fend a large num­ber of peo­ple. But what takes a lit­tle more ex­plain­ing is how some­one else, a sec­ond in­di­vid­ual, must have said “Yep, some­thing clearly miss­ing from the na­tiv­ity scene, and you know what, you’re ab­solutely bang on, it’s a man *****ing in the cor­ner. Why didn’t we think of that ear­lier? How could we have missed it? What an over­sight on our part! Let’s get one in there straight away.” And then what takes most ex­plain­ing is an en­tire pop­u­la­tion agree­ing that this was in­deed the best way to pro­ceed with the na­tiv­ity scene of Jesus com­ing into the world: by hav­ing him lying there in the crib while a man squats off to one side and un­bur­dens him­self of his load onto the sta­ble floor.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not the re­li­gious type and take no of­fence what­so­ever at the fig­ure of the ca­ganer. In fact, I whole­heart­edly ap­plaud its use ex­tend­ing to fa­mous celebri­ties/politi­cians and the like. You know you’ve made it in Cat­alo­nia when you see a fig­ure in your like­ness tak­ing a dump near the baby Jesus.

My point is not to crit­i­cise the in­ven­tion, which dates back to the late 18th cen­tury by the way, but rather to ques­tion how it was not only con­ceived, but then adopted by a whole na­tion. This then leads to the ques­tion of why Cata­lans are so com­fort­able around the whole scat­o­log­i­cal issue. The ca­ganer is of course a close re­la­tion of the caga tió, the yule­tide log that poops out pre­sents for chil­dren, or in­deed, the whole fam­ily, on De­cem­ber 24 after you’ve “fed” it for sev­eral weeks. Again, how this idea came about – that of a lump of wood dis­charges gifts to ec­sta­tic chil­dren – I have no idea, but can only won­der at the fact that an en­tire na­tion adopted it as a fam­ily Christ­mas tra­di­tion and now join to­gether in song each year to be­seech said log to re­lieve it­self of its load on the liv­ing room floor. The truth is, this is my 24th Christ­mas in Cat­alo­nia and I still can’t quite get my head around it.