Written by @loretosocorro
Although we are fortunate to spend most of the year with a climate that makes life on the street easier, when summer comes the air smells of freedom and the San Juan festivities become the key with which to open that cage that has us with wings still.
Celebrating San Juan is more than the tradition inherited from our ancestors, to celebrate the summer solstice, pay homage to the sun or the birth of the Baptist; With San Juan come the school holidays and the festivals that give away music and colors.
Now, without the corset of sanitary measures, joy returns to cities and towns where there are hardly any bonfires anymore, but that spell that is experienced only on the night of June 23 is not forgotten either.
If you have a beach nearby, nothing better than soaking in the water to be protected from evil throughout the year. According to my paternal grandmother, who lived in Melenara (Telde), if you catch nine waves on your back you will be very lucky: get a job, fall in love with whoever you want, have a child... How much magic is contained between liters of salt water and black sand. Some beliefs I grew up with ranged from telling the future by placing three potatoes under the bed: peeled, half-peeled and unpeeled; in the morning, you put your hand in and depending on what you took out, that was going to be your economic future for the coming year. Or also, play to burn a piece of paper where he had written something that he wanted to achieve or forget.
The trend of using flowers and herbs these days and on the occasion of the San Juan festivities comes from old. Although it is true that the staging is new, the use of herbs and flowers in summer parties has been with us for some time.
Making a sprig of St. John's herbs was also a custom with which it was intended to make a magical colony. They went to look for spring water and then let the flowers and herbs collected on the night of San Juan rest in it, because in this way the power of the water and that of the plants was multiplied. Then it was placed all night under the sanjuanera moon. With that water you cleaned your face the next day and, there were even people who made a stewed water. Seven herbs were used: rue, sage, rosemary, canary incense, lavender, rose petals or other local flowers.
I remember that when my maternal grandmother lived -in Pino Santo (Santa Brígida)-, the bonfires were prepared days before. All kinds of junk and old furniture were piled up: to discard the useless and also to play with the charm that the purifying fire gives.
In the bonfires where my mother jumped, pineapples and potatoes were roasted, to share among neighbors and family. Some old man would take out his guitar and shake it with the brown fingers of a farmer.
It was tradition to burn the bad and ask for good wishes: to scare bad fortune in company.
Antonio María González Padrón, the official chronicler of Telde, told us that the slaves brought to work in the sugar cane plantations and mills, jumped with their own dances and walked on the coals, in the Plaza de San Juan, many times to thank to the saint, when they managed to buy their freedom.
This year we will not see many bonfires: the fire has risen to the sky. What better tribute to the sun than getting closer and closer to the Star King. The beaches and squares of many Canarian municipalities celebrate San Juan with superstitions, witch stories, music everywhere, but above all with colored flyers.
The noise and smell given off by gunpowder, the one that was born two thousand years ago in a Chinese kitchen and that was later brought by the Arabs to Europe, is the most desired moment and for which many people come to look for the ideal place, where to enjoy the show with relatives and strangers, before and after the pyrotechnics.
The dark firmament is dressed in shapes and colors. In these islands we are more lovers of the flyers than of the firecrackers; and since we are a land of palm trees, we value a good palm tree made of fires. ANDIt is an effect that looks like a multicolored rain, as if the wings of a fairy had released magic dust on the ground. There are candles, flares, bomblets and rockets that, if you are able to concentrate on the waves of yellow, red or green colors, produced by burned metals (sodium, strontium or barium), it seems that you are traveling in the middle of the nebulae , only in the deep universe there is not so much noise.
What can we do now that fire flies higher than a kite? Where will we burn the pieces of paper? Those fireworks that are released so that they shine above us, up to 400 meters high, will perhaps be the fireworks of the new jumpers of San Juan. What wishes can the flyers ask for now that they are the ones who jump over this humanity?
Don't forget to wish good things!
