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Like each tribe, each man, each town, expresses the joy and the Faith with
expressions that are born of the deep thing of their way to be, if we contemplated what has been and what it is Christmas in the
Basque town, appear three dominant clear elements: the joy, the song, the good one for eating.
It seems that in these days and in spite of
the change of the times, we lived the form to feel, like the joy of the shepherds who in territories of Bethlehem received the message
opened of the "Gloria to God in the heights and the Earth peace to the
men of good will".
But as Italian poet
Manzoni when trying wrote to explain the singular fact that the apostles of Christ only spoke a
language and all they understood it,
saying that
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happened
as happens to the light, that does not have color and makes shine the different colors from the Nature and the
things, we do not have we a universal expression of Christmas, was lived on equal way in the soul, but of very different ways in the
song, the celebration that celebrates to Emmanuel.
Perhaps the oldest, lost antecedent in the fog of the centuries, is
the "Olentzero", a symbolic rite that has pervivido between the people
of the Pyrenean Basoue, and that now is extending by all the Country, although not with the fortune that had to accompany it, and completing
in the places that are celebrated, between dances and songs, irrintzis, this rite that perhaps comes from a pagan time, with the
cristianización of "alive Births" including in the retinues that they
cross, total of youth, our towns and cities.
An identical characteristic in all the Basque Country, is to begin to
live Christmas with caciones in the old language, of letrillas ingenuous and expresivas, in afternoon of the day in which the birth
of Christ is commemorated.
Of this tradition of singing in round, in Christmas Eve, with a
well-known tradition for at least five hundred years of data, the one of the "Marijeses" of Gernica: nine days before the Christmas Eve,
a group of guerniqueses men leave to four the house dawn, and is singing melodías inherited generation after generation during two
hours. A group of fifty voices, faithful to the tradition that stays
lives, with tasteful sacrifice, the one of madrugón, and the one to work normally later. In the magazine "Dantzari" a young
person, cult and enamored with his earth, Jose Antonio Arana, is going to publish
those naturally melodías with letters in euskera. Several of them gathered unforgettable
Sir Resurreccio'n Maria de Azkue.
A great wealth of christmas songs is had lost, although it works
now in revivir them and with them the tradition.
Face to the table christmas, the most extensive tradition, even in
Bilbao, is the one to eat snails. Since no longer there are so many as
before, for all those that want to eat this plate in "gaba-ona", they are taken shelter with time, and they are fattened with I
think, in boxes.
Which will be the future of the celebration of Christmases?
The prognosis is not easy. Yes one is clear that there is an eagerness
of recovery of the old traditions, heráldica nobleman of our town. And possibly new ways of celebration will be gotten up, that
God wants that they continue conserving, with the old wall-plate of and the good
thing, the spirit who animated to our distant ancestors: what is well clear is that the desirable valuation of the own thing is a
positive current, inserts in the eagerness of Renaissance of the soul is
vacant, so harassed by forgetfulnesses and persecutions throughout last the one hundred fifty years.
Is producing fact that friend mine, in more hard stage of life of our
town, when it seemed that we were going to disappear, said to me, like
a prophecy: "the Basoues you are like a forest. The storm arrives,
fall many trees, are thunders and rays; but the temporary one happens,
and the trees that are are stronger and the forest, in, greater and just a short time strong ".
Thus it is.
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Our Christmas: Yesterday, today and tomorrow