Which is, I guess, the only title you could give to this post :).

So, the holiday decorations are out.  Madrid is very proud of its decorative lighting, and apparently some areas hire professional designers to do avant-gard things with the lights.  We have only started to tour around to look at decorations.

For one thing, highly stylized glass or plexiglass “trees” seem to be en vogue.

Christmas tree in downtown Madrid

We hope to go back when it’s dark, so we can see this tree lit up.

We also saw some similar ideas while we were visiting Pisa, Italy and its surroundings for Terran’s work conference.  (We plan to do a whole post about that, but this one seemed more timely :). )

Glass Christmas tree in Luca, Italy

The conference sprung for a guided tour of Luca, Italy as an afternoon excursion, and our tour guide told us that this tree had cost €40,000, more than she thought the city really needed to spend on a holiday decoration.  It was designed by a famous designer, though I didn’t catch his name, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have recognized it.

Certain areas of Madrid have gone all-out with lights:

Lights on a street to the west of our apartment

And some companies are well-known for dramatic light displays on their buildings.  Even our tour book and the Madrid tourism website points out the department store El Corte Inglais is worth walking by.  (BTW: We learned from our Spanish instructor that, “corte inglais” is a cut for a man’s suit coat.)

El Corte Inglais

You can’t see it in the picture, but the snowflakes are actually “dripping” little drops of light that flow down the side of the building.

When walking through the plaza by our apartment at dusk, we were surprised by some not-Christmas.  We walked by a pavilion that sported the sign “Feliz Jánuca,” which we couldn’t make sense of until we said it aloud: Hanukkah!  It turned out to be a big menorah-lighting ceremony with what sounded like a reading from the Torah and singing in Hebrew.  Several news services were out to film it.  We, of course, didn’t have a camera.

We hope to do more of a walking tour of Madrid’s decorations over the holiday break.  Hooray!  This is my last day of work until January 3.  By that time, we hope to be settled in London.  We got our UK visas yesterday and made most of the travel reservations the same afternoon.  Yay for plans pushed to the last minute by red tape actually turning out all right.