Here's a Christmas Tradition to Try: The Pooping Log
Some holiday traditions never get old, and stick around for decades. Others . . . (psst, "elf on the shelf"!) . . . can really wear out their welcome. So here's something AMAZING to try.
There's a custom out of Catalonia, Spain called "Tió de Nadal." The name translates as "Christmas log" . . . but it's also known as the "poop log." Or the "[S-word] log," no joke. Here's how it works:
In the two-and-a-half weeks leading up to Christmas, families keep a regular, wood log in the home with a face painted on it. It also has a red hat, two wooden legs in the front, and a blanket over its back end.
The log represents a character who will poop out treats come Christmas day.
To get the log to poop, children pretend to feed it scraps of food . . . sing to it (specifically a song about pooping out gifts) . . . and then BEAT IT with sticks. (I know, sounds like a blast, right?)
On Christmas Day, after the singing and beating, the blanket is lifted off the Christmas log's back end, and SURPRISE: It has pooped gifts for everyone!
If you're thinking, where the heck did this come from . . . that's fair. But it's something that likely spun out of various yule log traditions. And the "beating with a stick" thing is similar to piñatas.
It's been around for a few centuries now . . . so it's evolved a lot along the way, and is more than just a random stunt someone came up with recently.
So give it a try: With the poop log, the family spends the pre-Christmas period taking care of the log instead of burning it, like they do most logs.
Pooping out candy, treats, and small gifts is its way of paying you back. It isn't emitting warmth . . . the way burning logs do . . . so apparently it emits something the only other way it can. (???)
(Here's an amusing breakdown of this custom. And if you haven't heard it, here's a bit that Jim Gaffigan did about it.)
Originally posted on December 17th, 2025