Joan Maragall wrote that Christmas is the festival of winter, of the night, but also of mystery. Although its origin is religious, since Christianity commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem, it is no less true that it has become a global holiday.
And 2022 years later, Christmas constitutes a collective state of mind, where humanistic values emerge. A whole president of the United States like Calvin Coolidge proclaimed a century ago that Christmas is not a moment or a season, but a state of mind.
In Girona they have made it a tradition that every December 22, at the gates of Christmas Eve, the Truffaut cinema shows the film How beautiful it is to live! , by Frank Capra, in subtitled version. Admission is free, but a donation to Caritas is accepted.
The cinema is filled to the brim to see again the emotional story where George (James Stewart), who has given up his dreams out of a sense of responsibility, decides to commit suicide on Christmas Eve. He will be saved by his guardian angel, who shows him how many people have survived thanks to his help and what life in the village would be like if he had not existed.
By the way, Capra showed the film to his family every Christmas so they wouldn't forget that the most important thing in life is generosity, solidarity and friendship. "No one is a failure if they have friends," says angel Clarence (Henry Travers) on the tape.
However, there are those who have forgotten the meaning of Christmas these holidays. It is surprising that the Board of Parliament has decided not to put a nativity scene so as not to offend anyone or that the Montpellier Administrative Court has forced the mayor of Perpignan to remove the consistory nativity scene for the sake of secularism, protected by law.
These decisions are absurdly similar to that of this Colombian who has decided to turn the Christmas tree upside down to show it off on TikTok. And it is that there are people who have lost the notion of what is right and wrong, the bad thing is that often their decisions affect our lives. And this is not the case of the boy from Medellín, who only wanted a few seconds of glory and a few thousand likes.
