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Every year around this time, my mother and I head to Vaughan, Ont., to buy the octopus and crab that make up our Christmas Eve dinner. In Spain, where we were both born, seafood makes up the main Christmas meal and people will gladly mortgage their house to buy percebes, the goose barnacles that are so expensive because fishermen risk their lives to peel them from the rocks along the Galician coast.
Here, we can find no percebes, alas, but in the large seafood store north of Toronto, other delicacies abound that will do just fine, although it often means risking your life to find the right one. Every year, the scene plays out in the same fashion – my mother opens the door of one of the enormous refrigerators and picks out an octopus to inspect, weigh and assess. This process is an involved one as she considers the provenance of the octopus. Is it from Indonesian or North African waters? The octopus does not like warm waters, she informs me, as she trades one octopus for another, weighing and inspecting as she does so.
I try to make myself small by the stacks of bottled water across from the refrigerators, in hopes of avoiding the gaggle of older women speaking to each other in Italian or Portuguese, who elbow their way through the store, striking your cart with theirs to exert their authority over you – which they do. Easily.
Eventually, I shrink myself to such an extent that they don't even notice me any more and run their carts right over my body without a care in the world. One year, I even found myself positioned between two carts as several women fought over the price of a tortoise, though it could have been something else as my Italian is not to be trusted.
Eventually we leave, frozen octopus and crab in hand, and I am forced to listen to my mother complain all the way home about how much I have rushed her, how, given the time, she would have chosen a better octopus and how Christmas dinner will be ruined by all of this. Last year, it was the crab that worried her – was it red enough, large enough, salty in just the right amount? This, in turn, leads me to threatening my own children so that they compliment my mother on her choice of octopus and crab until my mother looks at me with a raised eyebrow, informing me that she knows I have put them up to this and I am forced to stare them down into silence.
In truth, I no longer feel good about eating octopus even though my mother hails from the Galician town famous for the fiesta de pulpo that lasts for days as cauldrons of octopus are cooked and dished out on wooden plates to the thousands who arrive there to celebrate. Fidel Castro, whose ancestors hailed from this part of Spain, declared it to be the best octopus he had ever tasted when he visited the town back in 1991. I, however, have had ethical concerns about cooking the cephalopod since Paul the Octopus famously predicted that Spain would win the UEFA European Championship back in 2008. Since then, Spain has won the World Cup and another European Championship and Paul the Octopus has passed on to another realm.
If an octopus could be psychic, he could curse the octopus-eating Spaniards as well, even from the grave. My sons, avid soccer fans, shook their heads in disbelief at this concern, but were forced to admit, watching Spain get pummelled by the Netherlands during the World Cup of 2014, that there may be something to this after all. In any case, the octopus is a regal being, capable of changing colour to express differing emotions as well as having the ability to predict the outcome of important soccer games.
In the past few years, as my mother laments the little time she has been given to choose the right octopus, and as my sons hurry to assure her that it is indeed delicious and I get the raised eyebrow that brings this all to a close, I push the octopus to the outer corners of my plate and eat broccoli and potato instead. When my mother isn't looking, I discreetly empty the octopus onto a small plate and hope no one will notice I have refused the Christmas offering.
After dinner, I will scurry off to the computer and, once again, I will implore my fellow soccer-mad Spaniards on the website of the sports magazine Marca, to please give up the octopus in the name of all that is holy. Of course, I will be derided and belittled by the Spaniards who, I suspect, would be happy to give up another European or World Cup rather than go without their pulpo, but this will not stop me. If they do not listen, there is only one thing to do – wish them all a Feliz Navidad and wait patiently for next year.
Bea Gonzalez lives in Toronto.