Castañada against Halloween! Chestnuts against pumpkins!

I am the first who thinks that you have to be ready for changes; it is stupid to try to fight against them because sooner or later you have to admit them. You can’t be like Don Quijote fighting against the mills. World, society and people are in continuous evolution and we have to be ready for new changes in our future.
 

I know sometimes it is difficult to adapt ourselves, but unless you decide to live in a solitary island you have to get used to new things, habits and ways of living. And more now that technology it is so important for all of us.

I think in my grandfathers and I am sure they would have never imagined all the things you can do today with something so little as a mobile phone. You can say it is a small portable office. And I am sure that in 50 years life will be very different.

However, there are something that I think you have to keep alive. Especially, when we talk about traditions. As I said before, I understand that you have to get used to the technology changes but there are traditions in our society that we shouldn’t forget.

Today in Catalonia we celebrate the ‘Castañada’. Is a traditional holiday in where you eat chestnuts, sweet potatoes and a traditional sweet called panallet. I remember, when I went to school, that in the streets you could see people eating the hot chestnuts wrapped in newspaper. I even remember that once my friends and I did panallets for a party.

In the last years, and because of the American tradition, we are getting more and more things of Halloween. Shops and supermarkets have decided it to start celebrating this holiday and you can see special sweets and pumpkins everywhere and special offers celebrating Halloween. Today I am very surprised because I have seen a lot of children dressed up. When I was younger, I never got dressed up for the 31^st of October! Here we celebrate carnival in February and it is when young and old people get dressed up.

I understand that it is difficult to fight against the United Stated influence. We like to copy many things of them and there are a lot of people that like they live style. However, I think we should never lose our traditions. The Castañada is a nice holiday that should be celebrated every year. I think it will be a shame that in the future Catalans can't forgot the meaning of this day.

I repeat myself and insist that it is impossible to fight against changes, but we have to stay firm and preserve our own traditions. Now that the word independence is so common in conversations we have to remember those things that make us different and I can say that Halloween isn’t one of them.

I promise I will never celebrate Halloween and I always stick up for the Castañada. I prefer panallets and chestnuts than pumpkins!

Electronic cigarettes shop say goodbye

In one of my first posts I wrote about my opinion of electronic cigarettes. As I said then, I thought that it wasn’t a good solution for smokers. Obviously, I have to admit that is better to smoke an electronic cigarette than a normal one, but it is still a bad habit.

Another thing I pointed out was that in the last months they opened a lot of shops selling this device. And I advanced that a lot of them will close in a few weeks, because there were too many and I also thought that people would start talking bad about the electronic cigarettes. Every time I saw one of these shops, I told my wife that I was sure it wouldn’t last long. Well, I was absolutely right.  As a prove of it, you can read the  post I wrote a few months ago.

In the last days I have read that about 70% of the shops have –here you have an article  in Spanish- close due to the bad name of these devices. One near home has shut down, in L’Illa Diagonal the stand were they sold them is no longer there... In the past months, there have been different opinions pointing out that electronic cigarettes weren’t healthy for people and, finally, it looks like society has decided it to stop buying them and using them.

If you have a look in the streets, you don’t see so many people vaping. What smokers should do is stop smoking and not using devices that aren’t healthy.