"CHRISTMAS"

Christmas is a wonderful word, because when people think about it, they imagine the streets full of decorations, the night of Christmas eve, the illusion of a child the moment he or she opens the present… all those kinds of things that make you smile. But, is it really like that or it’s the image we’ve created about it? Christmas is a short period of spending money; it could be on presents, meals, Christmas sweets…

The word consumerism means the spending of the money without limits in the way of presents and other things that could be useless. In the past, people liked Christmas because of his essence, the feeling to be in front of a fire telling stories, there was no need to buy or receive presents.

Nowadays Christmas (for the majority) is based on spending, spending and spending more and more money on unnecessary things. A month, or more, before Christmas there is a huge amount of advertisements of toys, clothes, cologne or perfume, chocolate, chocolates and things like these.

Here in Catalonia we celebrate Christmas with the “tió” and, after Christmas, the Three Wise Men came to each town or city to see the children and give them sweets and little presents. That’s another example of consumerism. Why did the three wise men need to throw sweets and candy to the children? Why didn’t they only keep their letters with the list of presents they had written? Because that’s the new concept of Christmas. Children went to the street procession basically for the present, not only to leave the letter.

However it’s not everybody who has that image of Christmas. Poor people live it in a different way, I suppose.

A part from the consumerism Christmas has a special thing: it makes people more solidary. When Christmas comes and some poor people are in the street asking for a little money, people think it’s a good thing to give them something, because everybody deserves a little bit of magic on those special dates.