Grandparenting in the time of the kings

A few days before the New Year, Matilda and Elliott came to see us in our home in La Cañada, near Valencia. 

Well, they brought their parents too – at six and four, irritating rules concerning who’s allowed to do what on the highway meant they needed an adult to drive the car. Besides, it’s always good to have their parents nearby, so they can turn to them whenever they need a break from the company of their grandparents. 

Not that this often happens with Danielle, their Mamama. Nor with their uncle Michael, who was also with us. During a walk in the woods, he and Elliott had an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reverse roles in a shoulder carry.

Nice try. But not wholly successful

Winter visits naturally require respect for winter traditions. They arrived a couple of days after Christmas but, hey, what’s so special about one date rather than another? A Christmas tree, especially one with Christmas gifts underneath it, is just as wonderful on the 27th of December as on the 25th. And so it proved.

Just as enjoyable on the 27th as on the 25th

Another tradition we indulged in was the fine French winter dish of Raclette. This comes from Savoie, up in the Alps, so well suited to cold conditions. You grill slabs of the Savoyan cheese, Raclette, and then pour it over potatoes, to be eaten with pickles or ham. I like the underlying principle of this kind of meal which, like its cousin Fondue, has the diners doing some of the cooking. Besides, it’s a great dish – if you don’t know it, you should give it a try (come to think of it, even if you do know it, you should give it another try). But it’s even more fun with children happily learning to toast their cheese and use the special spatulas provided to scrape it onto their potatoes.

A dab hand at Raclette

Much less conventional but doubtless as much fun, was Mamama Danielle’s visit to the woods with the children to paint tree stumps. The idea is to colour the exposed surface of the stump, with enthusiasm and imagination, and demonstrate that in a woodland environment, not only will art imitate nature, nature and art also mix well.

 

Painting the forest

Nor did Danielle limit her activities with the children to painting. On the contrary, with their Dad Nicky, she took them to a bouncy castle paradise, where Matilda amazed everyone by her daring in tackling obstacles and slides even some adults feared to attempt. Elliott was never far behind her.

Matilda and Elliott: bouncy castle adventures

I too took the kids on an outing. This was to the next town, La Eliana. It has a playground that has long been a favourite of Matilda and Elliott’s, and it still attracts them. That’s despite the local council's apparent intent to wind it down, taking out pieces of equipment from time to time and not replacing them, so that it becomes increasingly denuded of sources of fun. That didn’t stop them enjoying themselves, however, even doing simple things like using bits of plastic they found lying around to decorate the sad site of a long-departed swing.

Art replacing boisterousness:
decorating the site of a long-gone piece of playground equipment

In any case, I’m not sure that it isn’t the travelling to get there and back that gives them their real fun, more than the playground itself. We go by metro and they love that. This time they made a new discovery: standing in the rubber-sided connection between carriages, which twists as the train goes around curves. Exciting stuff. At least as enjoyable as a vanished piece of playground apparatus.

Fun between the carriages

Then it was back to tradition. Mixed traditions, come to that. The great feast of the Christmas period here in Spain is the Feast of the Kings – los reyes – on the 6th of January, twelfth night. With unfaultable logic, that’s when Spaniards give children gifts, the idea being that the three kings in the Christian narrative brought gifts to the infant Jesus at that time. 

We had to take some liberties with the dates again, since the kids were going home with their parents in tow on 3 January. So we had the celebration a few days in advance. I can only say that the dating inaccuracy again did nothing to reduce the enthusiasm of the celebration.

With slightly less scriptural basis, the Spanish, like the French, celebrate the feast of the kings with a specific type of cake. In Spanish, it’s called a roscón de reyes (cake of the kings). In French, it’s a galette des rois (same). There’s a baker’s near us that makes the French variety rather well.

Roscón de reyes

Galette des rois

Danielle’s a good Frenchwoman at heart (well, as good as she can be: she’s from Alsace in the far east of France, on the border with Germany, and there’s some doubt about how good they are at being French, except as a way of not being German). She prefers the French version. Apparently, Elliott agrees, though Matilda would rather go for the Spanish variety. But in our house, our rules apply, and we had a French galette.

As the galette des rois protocol prescribes, the youngest person present (in this instance Elliott) sat under the table and called out the names of the people to receive each slice of cake as it was cut. That’s a way of ensuring that the slice with the little token in it – as often as not a figurine of one of the biblical kings – goes to someone selected entirely at random. This is important, I should point out, because the person who gets the token becomes the king or queen of the day and wears a fine cardboard crown, almost Trump-like in its golden glory. 

Whether we were quite as fair in the distribution of slices as these rules suggest I can’t claim with unqualified integrity. This year the crown went to Matilda, who duly became queen, just as last year, Elliott became king. 

He was less than enchanted with being usurped this year. He made clear his disapproval of this manifestly unfair choice (i.e. one that didn’t favour him) in the way that a four-year-old does best, though in his defence, he did that briefly before recovering his equanimity. Funnily enough, this is another common point with that fine President Trump, who also likes to express dissatisfaction with decisions that deny him what he feels is his entitlement (Nobel Peace Prizes come to mind). Unfortunately, unlike Elliott, Trump’s dissatisfaction comes backed up with serious armed force and powerful economic weapons. He also makes much more of a fuss and makes it for far longer.

Besides, in the grandkids’ case, Matilda had the generosity ultimately to give her crown to Elliott. Which is nothing like María Corina Machado handing over her Nobel Peace Prize medal to Trump. Matilda wasn’t expecting anything in return, so wasn't as disappointed as the Venezuelan opposition leader.

Elliott enjoying the crown

As for us, we all had a fine evening. Not spoiled even by the passing disagreement about the crown (Shakespeare was wrong: it’s the head that doesn’t wear the crown that doesn’t lie easy). And, even though Matilda might prefer a Spanish roscón, we all took great pleasure from our French-style, Spanish-baked galette.

All in all, it was a good visit, and a fine way to celebrate the season.