No. My first encounter with the concept was watching An Officer And A Gentleman, which would make that age 14.
Mooning is one of those concepts which are common in the US, sometimes in other cultures, but which leave your average Spaniard completely confused, either the concept itself or the ease of its application.
Ha, that’s hilarious. No, I’ve never mooned anybody - never occurred to me to do so - although I was once in a car with somebody who I never liked very much who was so drunk she tried to moon another car… but forgot to turn around. I’m laughing just thinking about it.
No idea unless LHoD is talking about some of the figures used in Fallas and similar stuff elsewhere.
It’s common for graphic satire to represent someone shitting on something: the minister of finance shitting on the economy, a democratically elected dictator (100% participation! even the dead vote!) sitting on a voting urn with his pants around his ankles… Since the most common form of graphic satire is newspaper cartoons, that’s where you will most often encounter this, but there are also a few instances where the graphics in question are temporary sculptures made of balsa wood and papier maché: the most famous ones are those exposed and burned down during Valencia’s Fallas (the name refers both to the festival and to the sculptures). Every year, a single figure from one of the compositions is “absolved” and saved from the flames: you can see pictures of absolved figures here under “ninots indultats”. (I don’t think there’s a single scatological figure among the saved)
But the caganet is not “a figurine of celebrities” and it’s restricted to a very specific occasion and in a very specific area. It’s a Nativity figure used in Catalonia.
It’s about as region-specific as the Kentucky Derby: known by the whole country, but the majority hasn’t seen it outside of an occasional TV blurb.
That whole article is bizarre. “An Iberian votive deposit was found near Tornabous in the Urgell depicting a holy Iberian warrior defecating on his falcata. This started a short-lived series of polemics between the Institut d’Estudis Catalans and the Departament d’Arqueologia in the Conselleria de Cultura of the Generalitat de Catalunya as to whether that can be regarded as a proto-caganer (which would place the origin of this tradition far earlier than previously thought) or just a pre-combat ritual.”
ETA - and, er, what’s up with the Catalans and poo? I doubt other regions have this sort of sentence attached: “The Caganer is not the only defecating character in the Catalan Christmas tradition.”