New Year’s Day with Family

Elyn and I were invited to the New Year’s Day dinner with our Spanish family, the Luna/Tovars. This gave us yet another opportunity to view family life in a closely-knit Spanish family.

The center of this family gathering was Piedad, Angel, and their two children. It was held in their home here in Sahagún. Angel is a highly successful civil engineer whose business involves planning and building bridges and roads in this region. Piedad is director of the Department of Translation at the University of León, a department that does translations of articles and other documents from Spanish to other European languages. Her specialty is translation into French. The two children, Alvaro, age 15, and Marcos, age 13, are exceptional in very different ways. Alvaro is an athlete and loves European football (soccer), while Marcos is a gifted flute player and actor. Arrayed around this central family were grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, more distant relatives, and the two Americans.

Elyn became an adopted member of the Luna/Tovar family in 1982, when she spent a year here researching her dissertation on the Camino de Santiago, which passes through the center of town. When we lived for a year here in 1997, we were taken in as members of the family.

The people at this dinner ranged in age from the ninety-nine-year-old father of Angel to thirteen-year-old Marcos. The age range will increase early this year when María, the daughter of Piedad’s brother, Pedro, will give birth to a little girl. These people see each other nearly every week since Angel and Piedad return to Sahagún most weekends from their primary home in León. The family is the center of most of these people’s lives, unlike most Americans, who live far from family and center their attention on friends of their own age.

Angel is interested in keeping the “old ways” alive. He planned and built the house and surrounding walled garden area. He raises an extensive garden, keeps chickens in the back area, makes his own wine, and butchers a pig to make his own ham and chorizo. He has his own traditional kitchen with wood-burning oven in the lower area of the house, next to wine cellar. Piedad, on the other hand, has her own thoroughly modern kitchen on the floor above. Angel prepared most of the New Year’s dinner. He cooked chicken from his own chicken coop, steamed clams, and sautéed gambas, which are large shrimp, cooked with their heads on. In the modern kitchen above, Piedad prepared the salad with greens from their own garden. Other family members provided side dishes and desserts, including a beautiful traditional flan prepared by one of the aunts.

My impression of these family dinners is that everyone talks at once and there are multiple topics of conversation. I feel totally confused both by the din and the speech, which is filled with colloquialisms and the overlapping topics, which shift rapidly from topics of the day to stories of ‘the olden days.’ My very limited Spanish totally deserts me and I hardly recognize a word.

The food is of amazing quality, as is most of the food we experience here. These people live well and eat well. They are happy with their life in a small pueblo and interested in expanding their horizons to include the wider world. They are looking forward with great anticipation to the Obama administration and interested in what we have to say about conditions in the USA. They prize their traditional way of life while being thoroughly modern in their thinking. We truly like these people and are grateful to be considered members of their extended family.