On (not) celebrating Thanksgiving and parallel neighborhoods

I was expecting to make a big thing of Thanksgiving, but I find that I'm ok finding analogies, rather than exact equivalents.

[UPDATED 11/26/17 with pictures]
 
First off, apologies for not blogging for several days.  I've had my usual interesting and happy routine, and while various things are going on, none of them seemed blog-worthy, though now looking at the posts I see that I have to do a few follow up entries since I left my faithful readers hanging about a couple of details.  I promise those are forthcoming, but this is a special (not quite) Thanksgiving blog.

All this week has been "Semana de Black Friday" and according to the TV ads it will remain "Semana de Black Friday" until November 27.  This reminds me of nothing so much as a line in El Intermedio when in response to a headline "Corruption trials dog the leadership of the PP" the host El Gran Wyoming remarked, "¿En serio?  Esto será Día de la Marmota.  O más bien de la Gaviota."  (There's an untranslatable rhyme there, since the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day is "Día de la Marmota" in Spanish, and the logo of the PP is a stylized blue seagull -- una gaviota.)  Black Friday ten days in a row does seem a bit groundhog day.  It also rather annoys me because Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays I actually celebrate with family, and I've always found the idea that somehow the focus is not supposed to be on being grateful for having enough to eat and wanting to share good fortune with others but really shopping slightly offensive.  Taking away Thanksgiving and leaving only the offensive part seems like a real shame.

I have been mildly fighting back though.  I have invited friends for lunch on Saturday when I will do a modified version of a Thanksgiving meal (hopefully I can get a turkey breast, and corn bread and butternut squash are definitely on the menu).  Tomorrow (at the request of a friend) I will go to her son's school and talk to a bunch of six to eight year olds about Thanksgiving and answer their questions about the United States in general, and my research in particular (if they ask).  I am anxious to explain that Thanksgiving is not about shopping, but a little worried that in my anxiety to explain the myth I may not do justice to the history - which is horrifying and would probably give six to eight year olds nightmares.  The modern world certainly has enough crazy religious fanatics who are all too willing to kill anyone in their path in their mad dream of establishing a city on a hill, but I'm not sure how to precisely relate that to the kids and then explain, "and then the crazy fanatics committed genocide and we celebrate this by pardoning one turkey at the White House every year, and eating lots of others."  When you put it like that it doesn't make much sense.  Still, anything is better than a week of Black Friday.

In any case, all of that is tomorrow and the day after, but today, which at home always strikes me as the one time when I really see nearly all the stores in my neighborhood closed, I ended up doing nothing except working at my thesis chapter and responding to the kind email of my Complutense mentor, who wished me a happy holiday and wanted to know why I was working on Thanksgiving (the answer being that it was a work day).  It really didn't seem worthwhile to shoehorn a holiday into a perfectly good work week, especially as a bunch of random puentes are coming up shortly in December.  (Including Constitution Day, which I imagine will be bittersweet this year.  I saw on TV today that the Spanish constitution was not officially published until a couple of days after it was "sanctioned" by the king because they didn't want its anniversary to fall on Holy Innocents' Day.  Possibly because the last constitutional government had been known as the "niña bonita" and they didn't want another pretty child to come to an untoward end.  Why tempt fate?)

I also went to yoga in the evening, after a mildly productive day, mostly for the sake of getting out of my neighborhood and walking a bit.  In the last week two people have independently compared the Chamberí neighborhood of Madrid to the Upper West Side, and as I was coming directly from home to yoga, I took the opportunity to get out at metro Alonso Martínez and walk up the Calle Santa Engracia, past the Plaza de Chamberí to make my own comparisons.

Plaza de Alonso Martínez at sunset, the southern end of Chamberí.  Note shared bikes, and bike lane.

Plaza de Chamberí at Twilight

I must say that I see why people make the comparisons between the two neighborhoods, though I'm not sure the Upper West Side boasts a single public space as pretty as the Plaza de Chamberí, which is an exceptionally lovely spot, with its fountain and playground, and benches, and cafés, arranged in spacious but friendly asymmetry.  Both neighborhoods have straight, wide streets, but are also lined by wide, well kept sidewalks, and the Calle Santa Engracia (which runs from Cuatro Caminos in the north on a diagonal south to dead-end into the Calle Hortaleza, and eventually the Gran Vía) has one of the few proper protected bike lanes in all of Madrid.  The wide avenue is lined with buildings from roughly the same time period too, though in Chamberí I would guess they are late 19th Century and on the Upper West Side mostly early 20th.  Though the architecture is obviously quite different in style, the buildings have the same tendency toward being graceful but not overly monumental (with the exception of a few churches, which are modest by Spanish standards, though certainly have a sense of their own importance). [UPDATE 11/26/17: Practically speaking, they are also generally the same 5-7 stories, with apartments above and stores below.]

The Calle Santa Engracia, near metro iglesia

Most importantly, the range of stores is quite similar: there are quite a lot of restaurants, pharmacies, and hardware stores, a sprinkling of "ecological" or "natural" food stores, and some unapologetic supermarkets and fruterías, interspersed with schools, office buildings, the odd institution (a Centro de Mayores, or municipal offices), and of course the occasional yoga studio.  Both neighborhoods are rich, so the prices tends to be slightly above average, but the stores themselves serve practical purposes, and are not the aggressively luxury goods of the fancier barrio Salamanca.  (There is universal agreement among my Madrid acquaintance that the Barrio Salamanca is like the Upper East Side.)  In short, Chamberí and the Upper West Side have the kind of stores patronized by people who have extra money to spend, and are willing to spend it if it for the sake of convenience, or if they can be convinced that they are paying for better service or quality.  Looking at the offerings available on the streets, these are neighborhoods of people who care for their own comfort and health, and that of their children and pets.  (There is also a veterinary center "specializing in exotic animals" along the Calle Santa Engracia.)  They like restaurants, but look askance at night clubs, as being noisy and possibly undesirable, though both neighborhoods are within comfortable walking distance of the bright lights of the conscious entertainment districts of Times Square and Chueca-Gran Vía respectively.  The streets are relatively quiet on colder evenings like tonight, but the metros and buses are crowded, and there are bicycle racks for private bikes (as well as the bike share) next to the rare protected bike lane.  The streets and sidewalks are scrupulously clean, and the statues tend toward modest life-sized bronzes of minor local politicians rather than imposing marble or funky modern art. (I had to look up who Manuel Alonso Martínez was, as there's a statue of him at his metro stop.  He edited the Civil Code of Spain in the late 19th C.)  These are on the whole neighborhoods that prefer fountains to graffiti, and schools to hospitals.  In short, these are neighborhoods of happy bourgeois, wealthy without being overly pretentious, capable of generosity to victims of hurricane, flood, or warfare, but willing to fight viciously to protect themselves and their young if they see their way of life threatened (which is why any government ignores them at its own peril).

Matching neighborhoods between Madrid and New York is fun.  I often say I live in the Jackson Heights of Madrid (diverse, working class, and outside the city center), and I suppose that the closest thing to the miserable monumentalism along the Castellana between Nuevos Ministerios and the Plaza de Colón would be the area around the federal courts and city hall in New York.  I maintain that madrileños find New York "facilísimo" (as one person told me this week) and vice-versa because there is some affinity between the cities.  (The deep-seated reliance on the metro, and several serendipitous coincidences certainly help.  I think of Metro Oporto as like Lorimer Street, since both are three stops on the "far" side of the river from the city center, and both are the conjunction of the gray and green lines on the map.)  But at the same time, I'm content that these are parallels not exact equivalents.  Madrid was open for business today, though there is a giant wire Christmas tree waiting to be lighted on the Gran Vía, which will doubtless soon be flickering with lights.  I assume that it will be closed for the "nochebuena" on December 24, and that the Thanksgiving Day Parade which did not happen today will be made up for by the brilliant Cabalgata de Reyes on January 6 (or thereabouts) down the Castellana.  The analogies are close enough to be comfortable, but different enough that neither Madrid nor New York is stupidly interchangeable.  Just "fácil."  So I will have my not-Thanksgiving soon enough.  (The supermarkets are starting to advertise turkeys "por encargo" - by special order - for "fiestas de navidades."  So even turkeys will arrive.  Just a bit late after a week of Fridays.)