Hoping for the Fat One

This holiday season, I have succumbed to FOMO.  That’s right.  At the precipice of my fourth Spanish Navidad – the fear of missing out has finally won. Now, this is not the new wave of FOMO induced by our addiction to technology and social media, but a real, old-fashioned fear of not doing what everyone else is doing.

And that would be the lottery.

The Spanish Christmas lottery is considered the largest and one of the oldest pots in the world – and tickets can be purchased in three ways: a series, a single ticket (€200), or in tenths (€20) of a ticket.  The best thing: there are multiple prizes and multiple winners.

Most often, people go in on tickets together.  A family will divide a €200 euro ticket amongst themselves.  Various groups of friends purchase portions together (friends from university, friends from work, friends from spinning class, friends from whatever imaginable.)

People tend to buy anywhere between 4-10 tickets each Christmas.  (This determined by my highly scientific method of asking people at random.)

And the "tenths" tickets are often given as gifts, a sign of friendship and goodwill.  And even more often, someone will give half of their ticket to another person so that the one-tenth ticket is shared between the two.  Thus, lottery buyers catch a bit more luck with (partial) ownership of more numbers.

Much conversation can be made out of what will be done with the money if your shared ticket (whether the series or partial number) is a winner.  People who go in on a ticket together usually decide to do something together with at least part of the money – that is, after all, a reason to go in on… well, anything… together.

Of course, not all turns out well with shared wins.  Stories abound about couples who have split over the money, siblings who no longer speak to one another, disagreements among friends.  It is only one ticket, after all, and possession is nine tenths of the law.

The announcement of the winning numbers is no less magical than the idea of a winning ticket.  A crowd gathers in Madrid’s Teatro Real, where wooden balls are pulled from two vessels.  Then small, magical children sing the numbers out to the crowd.

Companies commonly buy the big priced series, and sells portions to employees.  Such is my case.  Every.single.person where I work buys a company ticket (or two or three or four.) And if our series wins, every.single.person will get a piece of the prize.  Imagine those three years I did not buy a ticket.  If my company had won, I’d be the single poor soul still working for the money in the New Year.

Perhaps, you have just shrugged. Bah! Humbug! to the chance of winning the lottery. Bah! Humbug! to giving lottery tickets to others as gifts. Bah! Humbug! to idealistic talk of how to share the winnings.  But mostly: Bah! Humbug! to the possibility of winning.  Why  bother?

Consider poor Costis Mitsotakis, the only man in the small town of Sodeto, Spain who did not buy a lottery ticket last year.  The series selling in that town last year was a winner and the residents each garnered a share of €700 million.  Every.single.person – except Costis, who says he didn’t mind.  In fact, Costis is a filmmaker, so at least he was able to get some work out of it all, with a film about how the lottery win affected the town.  But this year, he knows better.  This year he is buying a ticket.

It’s not just about winning the lottery, though; it’s about tradition in Spain.

This year’s drawing is on Sunday, December 22^nd.  I’m hoping for the big “El Gordo” win.  So, in the tradition of Navidad, think of me kindly and when I win, I’ll think of you kindly too.