We already have a (almost) giant Christmas tree!

Following the ominous custom of absurd provincial cities like Vigo and Badalona, our capital will copy the tackiness of installing a giant Christmas tree in the middle of its beautiful stature. Good taste, an ancestral element of philosophical Barcelonism, had already been perverted years ago with that nonsense of celebrating the lighting of Christmas lights on Passeig de Gràcia, Yankee-fying our landscape to turn it into an Instagrammable minefield and thus transforming the backbone of the Eixample into a race of cretins in search of a selfie (fortunately, some of the tourists' incursions into the middle of the road, sprinting when the traffic light turns green, have ended in tragedy). Well, as if it wasn't enough to thus mutate the urban center into a shopping brothel, the privileged brains of commerce have decided to place another hideous Easter monkey at the beginning of the Jardinets de Gràcia.

But it's not all bad news: the Eixample shopkeepers do not present the phallic problems displayed by Spanish pro-men like Abel Caballero or Xavier García Albiol, and our tree will only be twelve meters high (they will buy it from a company in Vallès; since we are spending money on nonsense, it's better that it stays at home...) and, it must be insisted on this detail, it will be paid for by the shopkeepers of the same Paseo in collaboration with Casa Seat. But all that doesn't matter, because the branch in question will be crowned with a replica of the star of the Virgin's tower of the Sagrada Familia, so -given the constant perversion of our genius Gaudí by his current artistic spokespeople- we can justly expect the invention to end up looking like the entrance to a Vic whiskeria. It will also be filled with thirteen thousand LED lights, making it difficult to pass by without being able to ignore it...

As if we Barcelonans didn't have enough difficulties in the art of walking through the streets of Ciutat Vella without fainting, due to the slalom that mass tourism entails, and didn't suffer greatly when we buy llucet at caviar prices, now the City Council has had the brilliant idea of continuing to bet on Barcelona becoming the European Capital of Christmas. I am sure that my readers, very sensible people, have no bloody idea what this concept implies. I admit that I didn't know either, but after a five-minute documentation effort, I can assure you that the invention in question is a typical product of the European Union, which wants to reward a city that champions the values of the Old Continent and a model of a sustainable and super-cool Christmas city. The result, if we abandon the rhetoric, you can already imagine; even more tourists per square meter.

I understand that Barcelona, as a city fully integrated into globalizing banality, has to pay the toll of tacky aesthetics, whether in specialties such as the visual Christmas imaginary or the existential rise of matcha tea (this second phenomenon will be the subject of a special Punyalada, in a few weeks). But the demands of copy-paste aesthetics should not affect something as ours as small businesses, and even more so if it is in the center of the Eixample. If shopkeepers want to celebrate Christmas, I suggest they place a decorated tree at the door of their establishments - a modest, Christianly simple and sad vegetable antenna like one of our carols - and leave the rest of the street alone. Barcelona is a city that grows bigger when it is modest, so this display of excessive lighting has always been more typical of Castilian culture and cities that live from events.

One of the things that pleases me most about my city, and about catalanor in general, is the custom of celebrating holidays in a way that is not ostentatious, domestic, and without too much fuss. For all these reasons, this (almost) giant tree that they will stick in the Eixample will become my main enemy. I will disobey its presence like the grumblers of the capital; I will do my best to refrain from crossing its domains and, if I am forced to circle it, I will pretend to be blind, like a sadly nostalgic, alienated, and lame old man... who feigns illness so as not to see everything that insults his principles. We could also burn it, but, unfortunately, we are no longer the Rosa de Foc…