Christmas in Mijas arrives quietly. Not with snow, or frozen ground, or that sharp Irish cold that used to bite my fingers the moment I stepped outside. It arrives in softer ways. Light that lasts longer than you expect. Soil that never quite switches off. Lemon leaves that still move when you brush past them in the morning.
I noticed it first in early December, standing in the garden with a mug of tea and Max tugging gently at the lead, impatient to continue his circuit. Nothing had stopped. Nothing had been put to bed. Back in Ireland the garden would already be sealed, tucked in, sleeping until March. Here, it just… carries on.
That’s what Christmas in Spain feels like to me now. Not absent. Just different.
The garden doesn’t rest, it pauses
There’s a temptation to treat December as a kind of no-man’s-land. To assume you shouldn’t interfere. But the garden here never truly rests. It pauses, yes, but it keeps breathing.
The citrus trees are the clearest example. By Christmas the lemons are heavy and glossy, the leaves still pushing gently at the tips. I don’t prune now. I don’t feed. I mostly watch. I check for wind damage after a blustery night and make sure the soil isn’t waterlogged from a sudden burst of rain. Overwatering is the biggest mistake at this time of year. The roots are active, but they’re slower. They don’t forgive impatience.
I’ve learned to step back. To look more than I do.
Christmas morning, garden first
Old habits die hard. Christmas morning still starts outside for me.
Max insists on it. He knows the route by heart now. Out past the lemon tree, along the wall where the rosemary grows leggy and fragrant, around the corner where the soil stays darker and damper even in winter. There’s often a neighbour calling a greeting over the wall, or the distant sound of a radio already tuned to something festive.
The strangest part is the light. By ten in the morning it’s already warm enough to sit, briefly, without a coat. Not sunbathing warm. Just comfortable. Enough that your shoulders drop without you noticing.
It took me a couple of years to stop feeling guilty about that.
Bulbs that don’t follow the old rules
I planted paperwhites in pots again this year, mostly out of habit. In Ireland they were a Christmas thing. Indoors, usually. Controlled.
Here they do what they want. They come up faster. Taller. Sometimes a little wild. I’ve moved them into partial shade to slow them down, rotated the pots so they don’t lean too far into the sun. There’s less forcing and more negotiation.
The same with the winter bulbs in the ground. They don’t announce themselves loudly, but they’re there, quietly deciding their own schedule. Christmas no longer marks an end point. It’s just another moment along the line.
Poinsettias and the afterlife of decoration
Poinsettias appear everywhere in December, just as they do elsewhere, but what happens after Christmas is different. Here they don’t have to die.
I’ve stopped treating them as temporary. Once the decorations come down, I move them outside into light shade, cut back gently, water sparingly. They sulk for a while. Then, if you leave them alone, they begin again. Green first. Colour much later. Not in time for next Christmas, usually, but that feels appropriate somehow.
Not everything has to be seasonal on command.
Missing frost, missing nothing
I thought I’d miss frost more than I do. I thought Christmas would feel unfinished without it.
What I miss, occasionally, is the clarity. Frost makes everything sharp. Defined. Here, edges blur a little. The garden flows from one month into the next without ceremony. Christmas doesn’t close the year. It sits inside it.
That took some adjusting.
But standing there on Christmas morning, lemon leaves catching the light, Max already bored and ready to head home, I realised something. I wasn’t missing the old Christmas. I was just learning how to see this one.
The garden hadn’t stopped for Christmas.
Neither, it turns out, had I.