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In Barcelona, a Log Poops Out Your Christmas Presents
Look out, kids! Here comes Caga Tió!
Not every region in the world celebrates Christmas with a jolly fat man miraculously squeezing down your chimney. In Catalonia, Christmas cheer is delivered by a pooping log named Caga Tió.
Alex Markham recently wrote a piece, How The Vikings Gave Us Father Christmas, which explores different Christmas traditions celebrated around the world. Many date back hundreds or a thousand years. I was quite pleased Alex didn’t mention the Caga Tió of Catalonia because now I can.
A tió is Catalan for a wooden log or a tree trunk. It’s not an uncle or a dude like in Spanish. If you want to know what caga is, well, it’s derived from the same linguistic root as the English word “cack”. I’m just saying “poop” to be slightly polite.
So, anyway, Caga Tió, or Tió de Nadal, as it’s called in polite, more boring circles, is a wooden log that poops out tasty treats for children at Christmas.
Traditionally, what a Catalan family would do was go into the forest and find a lovely log about 30 centimetres long (that’s a foot in American). They hollow it out, give it four legs made of sticks, paint a merry little face on one end and pop a jaunty red hat where its head would be if it was a person.
