BODEGA TIO PEPE JEREZ (courtesey El Pantera Wikipedia
Perhaps I should get out more, but I am not aware of many countries that have special Christmas drinks. Britain definitely not, France, I don’t think so, Germany of course with its cloying glühwein, and that’s about it. Spain does not actually have drinks that are exclusively Christmas-orientated, but what happens is that drinks that seldom see the light of day during the rest of the year are suddenly everywhere during Christmas in Spain – and are often for free.
In the best tradition of Spanish hospitality, during Christmas in Spain, many shops and offices display a drinks tray offering anis and Spanish brandy, often alongside an assortment of typical Christmas sweets. Usually the latter are awful polvorones that are made from pork fat, flour and sugar – causing long breaks in the conversation as you try to eat them! Rather better are the equally typical pestiños, with flour and olive oil, baked and coated with honey. The famous Spanish turrón, a sort of nougat that comes in 101 different forms, including chocolate, is too expensive to be given away free. All such Spanish sweets are reckoned to have Arab or Moorish roots.
Everyone knows what brandy is (not allowed to refer to it as coñac), and it is a year-round drink, but ignoring the habit of (mainly agricultural) labourers to order an anis with their coffee in the morning, the bulk of the year’s sales of anis are over Christmas in Spain. There is dry anis and sweet anis, and both are made by macerating anis seed in alcohol.
The best-known brand of anis is Anis del Mono, and out of the various areas that produce it (Cazalla, Chinchón, Ojén, Rute, Asturiana, Castellana), the most typical is Chinchón. The Ojén brand is named after a village just inland from Marbella, but there is no longer a distillery there, even though the name is still used. A drink popular in northern Spain is ‘sol y sombra’ (sun and shade), that is half anis and half Spanish brandy – not for the faint-hearted but the brandy does away with the cloying sweetness of the desperately sweet anis.
Something that used to fascinate me when I was new to Spain was the sight of a traffic policeman on point duty surrounded by bottles, boxes of sweets, jams and even once a live turkey – a Christmas custom that is falling into disuse but a delightful way of showing the citizenry’s appreciation of the law-keepers!
RELEVANT INFO: Marbella villa – or barrio
