JanaGitana: * Spanish Christmas Lottery

Dec 5, 2007

* Spanish Christmas Lottery

Christmas Lottery or “Loteria de Navidad” it’s a funny phenomenon or rather a huge tradition in Spain. In November and December you can see ticket sellers everywhere on the street, bars, shops, markets. They also have a little kiosk every 200 meters. So by tradition everybody has to buy tickets, not just one, you also have to give them as a gift to everyone in your family, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, …
The system is not easy, so my friend Ingrid tried to explain it to me. A full number costs a lot of money, so normally bars and shops buys them and then sell parts of the number to whoever wants to buy it. It's like they are dividing the award in peaces and sell them. So if that number is the winner you take the proportional part you bought. Everybody buys some “numbers”, because the awards are really huge and there are possibilities to get some. If you just have the last number correct, you can get the money you spent, back. If you have the two last numbers you get more money back and so on.
On Christmas day there is a "sorteo" drawing in a really typical way. The winning numbers are traditionally sung my children from catholic schools. They sing the results as the balls with the numbers come out of the machine. It was really funny how they sang the numbers when they still had Pesetas because the numbers were really long…but now it has changed with Euro.

An interesting quotation that I found on net: "Two typically Spanish Christmas customs are the Christmas lottery and turrón," explained my Spanish friend when we were talking about the country's traditions surrounding Christmas. In pre-Christmas Spain it seemed that the lottery and the traditional Andalusian sweet turrón might be the only things uniting the country."

I will tell you more about turrón next time!