Cestas de Navidad are a big thing in Spain, really. They are Christmas hampers, often including wine or Cava, turrón and other Chistmas sweets, embutidos or Jamon Iberico, and so forth, depending on the basket’s size and its price tag. Cestas can be bought at a variety of prices ranging from 3 € to 600 €. You will find that most tiendas (retail shops) offer raffles with one lucky customer winning a fairly big Cesta de Navidad. The raffle tickets are given 5-digit-numbers which are related to winning numbers in the Loteria de Navidad. The winning lottery numbers were sung yesterday by children from the San Ildefonso orphanage in Madrid. The lucky Gordo number (79250) had been sold mainly in Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid and the north of Spain but, a total of 9,750,000 Euros were won with one of the eight fifth prizes in Palma de Mallorca (69069) with 5,000 € for each and every Decimo.

Felicidades to the lucky ones. Yours truly was not amongst them. I had bought one decimo of number 65556 but, in vain.

The photo was taken in Manacor, Mallorca, Baleares, Spain. The date: December 20th, 2010. The time was 13:28:39.