Waiting for Christmas
As every year does, Christmas is here to stay, at least until January 6th (here in Spain).
Streets are decorated with shining lights, public squares are full of child entertainments and several stores which sell Christmas stuff, and lots of buildings have any Christmas decoration.
The first great event here in Spain is the Christmas Lottery day (December 22th). There is a tradition (I don't know when it started, I think it did several decades ago), in which people buy lottery tickets (commonly since August or September), and share them with their relatives or friends. It's also common to exchange lottery tickets between people, I mean, you buy some lottery tickets related to your job mates or your football team mates, and you exchange them with the lottery tickets bought by your brother, sister, father, mother, etc., in his/her job, team, etc.
All of those lottery tickets are legal and have the autorization of Spanish administrations. One single ticket has 5 numbers, ranged from 00000 to 99999. There are lots of tickets of each number, but if your ticket is awarded, you win the prize money independently of the number of people who has bought the same number.
1 out of 3 lottery tickets win something (or 1 out of 5). Depending on the prize, you win more or less money. The highest prize gives 400.000€ to one single lottery ticket, which costs 20€. There are other categories of prizes, which give other amounts of money to other numbers. As a result of this, lots of people participates buying some tickets.
At the end, when the raffle has been done and the people knows if they're winner or loser, some of them are very happy and the others say "at least we are healthy" (of course if they are). That's the reason why that day, December 22th, is informally called "the health day".
Thank you very much for reading.