Christmas in Mallorca

The question of “where is the most beautiful Christmas” touches emotional archetypes. To some in the high mountains, where there is still real snow and plenty of pine trees so huge that even the smallest one beats the Parliament’s Christmas tree. To some others, in the southern seas, where there is no snow and pines, but, in contrast, there are palm trees and heat. Both offer a way out of everyday life, to another, cleaner, ideal world. To me it is where so many other things are most beautiful: the beach, the orange and olive grove, and the seven-hundred-year-old sounding in a single soprano voice in the darkened cathedral on Christmas night.

El Cant de la Sibiŀla, Mallorca. Jordi Savall, Montserrat Figueras, La Capella Reial de Catalunya, 1998 (36'50)

The ideal world also sends a message even when you cannot get there. No one would think of this picture as being a Christmas postcard, though it is. In the top, only indicatively, the same sea as in the pictures of the just linked post. In the middle, the tops of the olive trees. And in the foreground, the garden of Wang Wei, with a severe hiatus: the stump of the beautiful and beloved pine tree that the storm tore out a year ago. But the focus of the image is not this lack, not the loss, but the small red promise towering in front of it. Like in Fereidun Moshiri’s Believe in the spring.

The postcard in my little home Kunstkammer, together with a mediterranean Venus found on the other sea