Christmas in the Basque Country starts with Santo Tomas, a celebration in which most people go out onto the streets to dance and eat txistorra (a type of Basque chorizo). They wear a traditional outfit called the casera dress. For girls it consists of a long skirt and a long-sleeved old-fashioned shirt with headscarves and aprons. The boys wear a long black shirt, trousers and what looks like a French black beret. The casera outfits are normally dark blue, but can come in many colors. They wear caseras because that is what the people of the mountain wear and the holiday used to celebrate the peasants who sold their goods in town and came on Santo Tomas to pay rent to landlords in the city.
Read more about Christmas In The Basque Country: The Santa of Basque Country, Christmas Day
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Oxford Book of Light Verse, The. W. H. Auden, ed. (1938)
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