Christmas has passed. Christmas and Boxing Day. These two holidays in our country carry a special weight of family, tenderness, and often a touch of the mundane. Now, the Christmas festivities have become commercialized, contaminated with foreign traditions. We have decorated fir trees, gifts under the tree, we have Santa Clauses and reindeer and sleighs, we have sweaters embroidered with all this colorful imagery. Our nougat is now joined by the ubiquitous panettone., Someone on the radio the other day was already looking for a Catalan translation. One person suggested panettone; another, even, panotReferring to the tiles that pave the sidewalks of Barcelona. I would leave it in Italian, so we're not mistaken about its origin. Our prickly holly—our forbidden holly—has also been replaced by Mexican poinsettias, or Christmas flowers, as they call them, cultivated in enormous greenhouses. And moss is protected too. You can no longer go to the forest to collect it. I bought some from a florist, and she told me it came from Soria. Without moss, how will we make the nativity scene? Perhaps I should say: how will they make it? Perhaps they won't make it anymore. Traditions develop little by little. And they end quickly. Or perhaps they are slowly lost. I don't know. The fact is that I still made a nativity scene this year, smaller than in other years, but with everything it should have.

The hedgehog is a creature that naturally tends to curl up into itself and make its navel the sole object of its interest. It finds nothing external more appealing. For this reason, Saint Augustine saw in the hedgehog the sad image of narcissistic man, incapable of loving anything that doesn't reflect his own image. This man loves reflexively. incurvatus in se...curled up in self-indulgence. Such love, says Saint Augustine, betrays the true nature of love, which is altruistic. The essence of love is to love the image of the beloved in myself, not my own image in the beloved. Love is the self-transcendence of the lover in the beloved. To love is, in a certain way, to become the one who loves. It is necessary, therefore, to look at what we love, because that is what we are.

Christmas is approaching, and it shows in the decorations. Natural elements take center stage, whether in the form of fir trees or moss for nativity scenes. In the past, it wasn't unusual to go to the woods to gather the necessary materials, but today this is discouraged: this seemingly insignificant practice does considerable harm to the environment. On a small scale, it may seem harmless, but on a large scale, it's a form of exploitation that leaves a lasting impact.