The Fish Are Drinking Again

I'm heading to Madrid soon—scouting it properly this time, because I'm seriously thinking about spending all of 2026 there on sabbatical. And whenever I'm in this pre-move limbo, I start noticing tiny cultural details that feel like secret handshakes from the place itself. Not the big stuff—the Prado, the history books—but the small, stubborn things that tell you how people actually live and think.

Right now, everywhere I scroll, I keep running into that old villancico: Pero mira cómo beben los peces en el río. You know the one. The fish are drinking in the river—drinking!—to see the baby God who's just been born. The shared video from YouTube is particularly delightfull.

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I grew up hearing it, and it always blended into the holiday noise. But this year, it's hitting differently. Maybe because I'm paying attention. Maybe because the song is just absurd enough to demand it.

The Fish Are Drinking Again, but the fish don't drink from the river. They live in it. They breathe it. The whole image is biologically ridiculous, and that's exactly the point. The world, the song says, has gone joyfully haywire because something immense has happened in a stable. Nature itself is tipsy with wonder—fish guzzling water like it's champagne, rosemary blooming in winter, birds singing backup. It's not trying to make sense. It's trying to make you smile and stare.

These Spanish Christmas songs—the villancicos—have always done this. They put the Virgin Mary in the kitchen, washing diapers, combing her hair with an ivory comb, hanging the clothes on rosemary branches. God slips into the ordinary, not with thunder, but with laundry and lullabies.

What gets me is how gently the song insists: mira. Just look. Don't explain it. Don't reduce it. Don't rush to interpret. Just watch the fish drink, and feel the strangeness of it.

I need that reminder right now. My work on Sonata Mulattica keeps pulling me into the grand machinery of Enlightenment Europe—ideas, institutions, race, power—but these little songs remind me that folklore travels in children's voices, in tunes that survive because they refuse to be to make immediate sense. They are crypto-tunes that carry the voice of the ancestors. Mira como beben…

And somehow, on Christmas Eve 2025, this silly carol about tipsy fish feels like the perfect traveling companion for whatever waits in Madrid.