The best gift

It's useless to hide it. Our life still seems rather… suspended. The events that are pressing give no respite: the pandemic that sheds its skin and is not completely overcome (now also rethought - in a worrying way - from geopolitical angles that sometimes leave you stunned); the high price of everything in daily shopping and energy costs in particular; the winds of war that remain icy and full of unknowns and suffering where weapons crackle; the troubled arrival of migrants in search of dignity and a future while they risk ending up crushed by merciless mechanisms of policies in debt to humanity... In short, shadows that affect people's existence.

Meanwhile, Christmas is looming on the horizon, with all its contours that are well known to us. Incidentally, just a nod to the diversified choices of municipalities and community realities, with respect to the dilemma of whether or not to turn on the Christmas lights to save electricity. Never before has there been an urgency to go to the essentials as on this occasion, perhaps tuning into the Christmas of faith which cannot be reduced to the Christmas of flashing lights and musical motifs from Jingle Bell.

The emergencies that follow and add up ask us to get serious. Which doesn't prevent the true taste of the party, but without overdoing it, without ending up distracted, without losing touch with reality. Woe to being sucked into the logic of parentheses, "before Christmas"! We don't go far pretending that we'll talk about it again after the Epiphany or after the Epiphany. Instead we are asked to go through the holidays with all the troubles that are weighing down on our horizon. For those who believe, the Christmas frame should remain the same, because the protagonist of the crib is the One who saves, tracing another path, drawing important steps for complicated times, offering the Gospel as a life choice... while everything darkens. And the Son of God made a child is worth enormously more than the more or less reproducible "party climate".

For everyone it must be a time of sharing capable of lasting over time. You need a change of pace that helps you walk on new routes that can withstand bumps and don't stop immediately. And if around the corner, indeed under… the tree, we find perhaps the least awaited gift which is that of sobriety. Let's appreciate it without discounts!

Corrado Avagnina
NP December 2022