SPAIN: Our Easter parcel

This week, on Monday 23rd, we sent our Easter parcel to our French partners. Having in mind cultural awareness, we need to post some comments before our parcel arrives: You need to remember that in Spain there’s no tradition about Easter cards, so my students have made their best inspiring themselves on Christmas cards or on Internet models of foreign ones. The reason for this is that Easter is a “sad” holiday in Spain due to the catholic impregnation that makes great emphasis in the painful memories related with Easter. Anyway, our younger students are taking distance with this traditional point of view, especially in those places, like the ones we live in, where Easter manifestations are not very established, so that it can be considered as a Spring holiday or a 2nd and 3rd term in between break.

In many places across Spain there are colorful and picturesque traditional parades, called “procesiones” in Spanish, that have a deep religious meaning for many people, and that, year by year, are getting a greater impact in tourism becoming mass destinations for people from other places of Spain and abroad, shifting their intrinsic traditional meaning to a softer one. The greater display of that kind of events happens in the south of Spain, but with some prominent examples more to the north (like León, Zamora, Palencia,…) and even some of them in Galicia, the region where we live: Viveiro and Ferrol are two cities that have a deeply stablished tradition of Easter manifestations. But, although in any Galician city or village you can find a small “procesión", there’s not so big adherence specially in young people. Hope these explanations can serve as help to understand our parcel’s content.