x-mas tree

Yesterday on the news we saw Italian Prime Minister Letta addressing the Senate.  Behind him was a well decorated Christmas tree. A beautiful, sparkling, tree ladened with red balls and bows.

Let me take you back twenty years when Christmas trees were less popular in Rome.   Those we saw looked as if they'd been decorated by a first grader with help from his misbehaving dog and a few monkeys . . . make that a drunken monkey with a grudge.   The result was bad, bad, terrible.  I speak the truth.  We have seen some of the most poorly decorated, bedraggled, cheerless trees imaginable.  Irregularly lit with badly spaced, unidentifiable ornaments was the norm.  We'd even seen a tree festooned with half blown up balloons.

M. who was born with the Christmas gene used to grit her teeth at the sight of tree tinsel which always looked like it had been wadded into a ball and applied with a slingshot.  And, Babbo Natale, aka Santa, always wore a scroungy, old costume, as if he had crawled down too many chimneys.

This time, for the first time, there on national TV, behind the Prime Minister was a lovely tree.  It must be television with an injection of Internet that has dragged Rome, naughty or nice, into our fashionable millennium.