You guys, I’ve just found a post sitting in drafts with my Oscars predictions for 2023. It’s been that sort of a year. But never mind! It’s nearly 2024, which is bound to be loads better. Isn’t it?

Anyway. We begin in Colombia, which is mostly in the northern hemisphere, but enough of it isn’t that it qualifies for our purposes. I am easing you in gently, you see. Mi Burrito Sabanero is actually a Venezuelan song originally, but for reasons which I have not entirely been able to discern it is now beloved of Colombians, which is lucky for us because Venezuela is all in the northern hemisphere so we wouldn’t have been allowed it otherwise.

(I am hoping that you, like me, will get a gentle geography lesson over the course of the next twenty three days.)

Anyway, don’t be put off by how much the first singer sounds like Ann Stephens in They’re Changing Guards At Buckingham Palace (as my mother once said, ‘I can only think she must have been the producer’s daughter’), because it gets nicer once the choir join in. I was going to translate the lyrics for you, but they appear to be largely nonsense, so I haven’t bothered, but with my expertise in Spanish I can tell you that it seems to be about a donkey travelling to Bethlehem. Plus the donkeys in the video are wearing Santa hats, so it is definitely a Christmas song, even though it’s only Colombian if you squint.