DOING IT FOR THE KIDS

I went for a wan­der on my own for Sant Joan this year. I don’t nor­mally go out on June 23 due to my aver­sion to what I deem to be un­nec­es­sary loud noise and my gen­eral in­tol­er­ance of mis­chief, these being a cou­ple of things I’ve come to as­so­ci­ate with the cel­e­bra­tion after years of dodg­ing fire­crack­ers thrown by cack­ling teenagers and ex­plod­ing fire­work bombs de­vised to make you jump out of your skin. I’m also not too keen on the way kids gen­er­ally swag­ger about with a fist­ful of fire­works on this night, as if they are sud­denly em­pow­ered to do things they would not even con­sider doing on a nor­mal sum­mer Sun­day evening.

But this year was dif­fer­ent, my son is old enough to do his own thing now so I de­cided to take a me­an­der around the neigh­bour­hood of Gràcia to a) find a fire on which to burn some per­sonal things I wanted to see the back of and b) take in the at­mos­phere, partly in the hope that it wouldn’t be as bad as I re­mem­bered.

Turns out it was, as I spent most of the time skip­ping away from the afore­men­tioned arte­facts, but of more in­ter­est to this col­umn were my re­flec­tions on what this cel­e­bra­tion seems to be all about. It’s not a hol­i­day we cel­e­brate in the UK, and when you first ar­rive in this part of the world, wit­ness­ing a cor­refoc in all its glory is one of the more spec­tac­u­lar sights on the Cata­lan fes­ti­val cal­en­dar, in my opin­ion. How­ever, what caught my at­ten­tion as I wan­dered the streets of Gràcia around mid­night dur­ing this year’s fes­ti­val was more re­lated to a phe­nom­e­non I’ve seen so many times be­fore here and al­ways found, let’s say, cul­tur­ally pe­cu­liar. Namely, that this whole cel­e­bra­tion ap­pears to be geared to­wards the fam­ily and above all chil­dren. At 1 o’clock in the morn­ing in the square where I was stand­ing, there was a bon­fire to my left sur­rounded by teens throw­ing fire­crack­ers, adults drink­ing and chat­ting in front of me, and a stage with a band per­form­ing to my right. The point I’m mak­ing refers to the band: they were per­form­ing in an open-air venue after mid­night with al­co­hol on sale... but they were play­ing kids’ sin­ga­long songs, with adults and kids alike danc­ing to fa­mil­iar chil­dren’s tunes as they frol­icked around in front of the stage. This seemed a very ob­vi­ous cul­tural dif­fer­ence to my mind, as even at this late hour the event was still cater­ing to the kids, some­thing I can’t imag­ine in other cul­tures, where the mix­ture of music, al­co­hol and the late hour would ex­clude kids from even at­tend­ing, let alone being the focus of the en­ter­tain­ment on offer.

All in all it was quite a spec­ta­cle and yet an­other ex­am­ple of how fam­ily-ori­ented the cul­ture can ap­pear here when com­pared to oth­ers I’ve lived in. An op­por­tu­nity to drink and dance to music, and every­one’s singing as if it’s a kid’s birth­day party at 4 pm on a Sat­ur­day? Is that some­thing that would hap­pen any­where else?