Christmas comes but once a year and I usually really look forward to the magical lights that transform Barcelona’s dirty façade into a fairy wonderland. Not so this year. Who designed this year’s illumination? Last year, the complaint was that the city didn’t have enough lighting compared to other European cities. This year… They have gone overboard in the worst possible manner.
I know we have to be concerned and use energy-saving light bulbs, but this is ridiculous. When has blue ever been a valid Christmas colour? Is this some sort of plan to modernize Christmas? Does Barcelona really need to be so sanitized? Whatever happened to the classic white, cream or gold lights of Xmas’s past?
Many of the streets just show a repetition of lights, there isn’t even all that much variety. People complained about the “galets” that were placed around the city. They actually don’t look too bad considering their seashell appearance which none of the tourists understand. Barcelona has become a complete eyesore and it’s really quite a pity.
Why doesn’t the city offer a competition, open to the general public, to design each year’s Christmas illumination? Maybe that way we will would have prettier options that are easier on the eye.
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We All Love Complaining…
19/05/2010 at 11:19 Permalink
I think Christmas lights, as most of other christmas related social habit, is an issue of the past century about which we should be ashamed.
Or at least, christmas lights in this manner. I understand to some point this tradition at don’t reject it as a principle basis, but I don’t like the way Barcelona does it and its social perception.
In the street, certain shops say in posters “we collaborate with christmas lighting” as a “salvation claim” or some sort of weird corporativism and “suspicy from the neightboor” at the same time. In the meaning that if you don’t claim as a collaborator of christmas lighting chances are that you’re miserly, you don’t like christmas, and you don’t want to endorse with other’s shop colleagues.
Current christmas lighting is an offense to common sense about energy and resources saving (and some times to aesthetics), and to be proud about it is near to amorality or stupidity, or both. What about more discret, simple lighting, crafted by children or old people in a neightborhood workshop, for example, or other kinds of rethinking tradition?. This kind of thinking is what I expect from a XXI century society that is supposed to be prepared for voting a new Diagonal avenue or things like so.
Great blog!
19/05/2010 at 17:45 Permalink
Gracias Raimon por tu comentario. Menos mal que aun queda gente en Barcelona que tiene una opinión. Habrá que esperar a ver que pasa con la nueva Diagonal y con las luces de Navidad este año. La verdad, para seguir colocando luces como hace ya unos años, mejor no poner nada. Estoy completamente de acuerdo contigo.