The city is the natural space for public discussion: apart from air quality, the lushness of parks and forests, the number of kindergartens and school meal grants per square meter and so on, the health of a capital is determined above all by the level of its debates. An old and recurring one, I confess also one of my favorites, is that of Christmas lighting. They say that this year the City Council has decided to reduce the hours of Christmas lights (they will be on for a total of 217 hours, 42 less than in 2021; specifically, the initial click will be given at half past five in the afternoon until ten at night between Sunday and Thursday and until eleven on Fridays and Saturdays), a measure agreed upon with merchants, restaurateurs and other consumption foremen. The budgeted investment is two million three hundred thousand euros, with an increase of about four kilometers of lights in the city center that will stimulate credit cards from November 24 until the night of kings.
The fact that a city like Barcelona tries to be competitive without giving up on mitigating energy waste seems far from minor to me, and even more so when the City Council covers 75% of the pasture we will dedicate to nativity scenes and the total cost of their installation. It honestly comforts me that the Councilor for Commerce, Markets and Consumption, Montserrat Ballarín, gives us LED lighting decoration and that the City Council has not fallen into the delirious megalomania of other Spanish cities. However, this servant looks at this discussion from the most absolute marginal condition of atheism and aesthetics: I long ago abandoned the militant pretension that a minimally rational society should not surrender the calendar (and, therefore, civic life) to the arbitrary will of religions. I have also given up on fellow citizens being guided by good taste and resignedly accept that every Tom, Dick, and Harry naturally sees the streets smeared with so many tributes to bad taste. The Christmas lighting, no matter who likes it, is tacky and dreadful. Its existence has nothing to do with consumption, as human beings do not need any little light to push us into stores as if we were a herd. In fact, if stores in Barcelona needed anything, it would be an urgent reduction in their luminous brightness: to the majority of insufferable background music in shopping centers (played at the volume of a nightclub and a nauseating selection of songs), lately an absolutely blinding level of luminous whiteness has been added. From here I sympathize with and address the saleswomen in most clothing stores who, shortly and if providence does not prevent it, will suffer a fatal mixture of blindness and eardrum ruptures. Asking citizens to have candles at home while we continue to light the streets in a pornographic way and with a horrifying aesthetic sense seems incomprehensible to me,even knowing the contradictory nature of humans.The president of the independent republic of Madrit says that a city in the dark is not very cheerful and looks very poor. On the contrary, the civilized world lives with parsimony the arrival of darkness and takes advantage of sunlight by making use of the very civilized and free habit of getting up early. Even if one defends the mystique of Christmas iconography, the spiritual effect of a small illuminated star on a very modest bell tower is much more transcendent, beautiful, and rich than an avenue filled with this unbearable tutti frutti of lights that equates beautiful places like Paseo de Gràcia to a roadside brothel. All of us who were born with the grace of having blue eyes painfully suffer the effect of the lighting. To my Nordic and albino nature, I add living in Ciutat Vella, so I can now prepare to face one of the twelve months of the year under the tyranny of a sea of mediocre lights. I thank the administration for saving me 42 hours of ugliness.Christmas lighting, like it or not, is tacky and dreadful. Its existence has nothing to do with consumption, because human beings do not need any little light to push us into stores as if we were a flock.
It is symptomatic that the reduction of Christmas lights comes from an environmental imperative, while the mere pretense of eliminating them, citing good taste and the values of a world with less influence from divinities and the survival of our eyes, is seen as a fussy person's whim. And they still say that progressives govern us. What a cross.