El Gordo

If you've ever wondered what the Christmas season is like in Madrid (or anywhere in Spain, for that matter), one way to sum it up rather well is this single word: lotería. The Spanish are obsessed with this lottery, and I don't mean by this that they get really excited about it and buy lots of tickets or something. No, pretty much every family, group of work colleagues, group of friends, or whatever other social group you can think of (entire villages, even!) get together and purchase tickets as a group, with the intention of course to split the winnings should their ticket win. For example, at my school, the teachers all pooled together to buy tickets.

Now, I know I probably sound like I'm being overly dramatic about this, but I cannot tell you how many times I passed by little lottery vendors in Madrid during the month of December with lines that literally went for blocks and blocks. I think perhaps it just blows my mind a little because for one thing, I'm not much of a gambler. In fact, I don't think I've ever even bought a lottery ticket of my own in the US. But the bigger reason I can't really grasp the idea of the lottery obsession is perhaps also one of the causes of the obsession: the economy here is currently, well, not good. Why waste money on stupid lottery tickets?!  

Now, the lottery here is different from what we Americans are familiar with - there are several different "prizes," or different cash sums that are distributed among people with winning tickets. According to my favorite source, Wiki, around 98% of Spaniards buy Christmas lottery tickets (which began in 1812), and said tickets are available for purchase starting as early as August. Ironically, apparently this past Christmas's lottery was the biggest in history (the equivalent of $950 million). Anyway, this past Christmas's first prize winners came from a small village up north in Aragón called Sodeto. The main reason for this post, actually, is because I was reading about El Gordo ("the fat one"), as the lottery's first prize is called, in this article in the NY Times. Just another bit of Spanish culture about which I'm slowly learning.