Everything in half light. “I like to create an intimate atmosphere, with candles, indirect lighting, which encourages conversation and confidence.” The table is almost a sacred place for Teresa Lloret, who through @lasmesasde_teresa shows her passion throughout the year, from breakfast every day to a dinner for two, but especially during these holidays, the high season for family gatherings and banquets. . On the sideboard, Valentino: At the Emperor’s Table, a delicious book from the Assouline publishing house and a source of inspiration. It's time to show off the dishes, shine the silver and scatter all the pieces of glassware. Open the candle drawer and choose the finest, most elegant ones... This year, the children of the family and their respective partners, who live abroad, and their only grandson will gather around the Christmas table.
To celebrate the holidays, family and the turn of the year, Magazine has brought together five characters who experience Christmas in a very different way, from Rafa Soldevilla and his wife, Yana Rial, who intensely enjoy every party and every occasion, to Judith Mascó or Jorge Subietas (Object of Desire), for whom until recently the best Christmas plan was to spend the whole day in pajamas at home. “I am the Grinch,” says Subietas. But even the Grinch submits to holiday traditions. “We only celebrate Sant Esteve, my mother and my sisters get together, we all eat like little birds, but the table is packed.” A part of the holiday routine that he hates. “For me, everything should be over on the 27th, the rest of the days we go from party to party, exhausting,” he says.
For the writer Llucia Ramis, who admits that she does not decorate the house with Christmas motifs, the holidays mean, above all, family. A lot of family: from Madrid, Mallorca and Catalonia. “This year we have to meet here, we can reach 40 people at Christmas.” “But my favorite day is day 1; It is a day that does not exist, that time stops... I like to go swimming in the sea, even if it is very cold.” Chocolate mousse cannot be missing from her family's festive menu, "part of the family has Belgian origins and it is a tradition for us."
“There is always caviar on our party table, but I love all the traditional dishes, especially cannelloni.” Yana Rial, of Russian origin, likes to celebrate New Year's Eve in style (“in Russia we didn't celebrate Christmas traditionally”). Since she has settled in Spain, she has always celebrated it with the extended family of her husband, Rafa Soldevilla: “Just as cousins, more than twenty of us get together.” On every trip they take together, like a recent one to London, they buy ornaments for the tree. “We love to decorate the house well, and the tree reminds us of all the trips we have made, it is our tradition,” says the couple.
Judith Mascó's Christmas spirit is closer to that of Subietas. “They are festivals that children and older people especially enjoy, but I'm not passionate about them.” As the years go by — “my daughters are older” — she says, the magic is lost and they become an exchange of gifts, pure and simple consumerism. Even so, she admits, “we celebrate everything: Christmas Eve for my husband, from a Castilian family; Christmas, and Sant Esteve on the Catalan side.” Of course, New Year's Eve is for her friends: “We meet in Cerdanya with the usual colla.” On her table, some good appetizers and a long after-dinner meal, with nougat and sweets.
Party saturation? “After these dates, my tables become minimalist, although I continue assembling and decorating to enjoy,” says Lloret.
The writer Llucia Ramis is preparing a new book for next year. Businessman Rafa Soldevilla plans a new opening of La Fermata, a sliced pizza establishment, and with his wife Yana it is time to welcome a child. Judith Mascó only wants her and her loved ones to continue with their “normal lives, which those who suffer a war cannot have” and, perhaps, a family trip like the one that took them to Egypt this year.
