I wish you a great Christmas, filled with joy and the right personal choices!

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This is a strange Christmas with too many people trying to cancel it, some for cultural reasons as the European Commission, others finding excuses in a virus that seem to spread only in specific situations.

It is always difficult to find a proper reaction to evil when it’s in charge of our lives, so I was wondering what to do and the question came natural: “What would John Galt do?”. The answer was very easy and so here’s my traditional Christmas image for the year 2021!

This year, more than ever, we are in a war, it’s not a traditional war at the moment but a cultural war. One side is the side expressing all the values that permit to appreciate and enjoy Christmas, the other side is the side that is not able to joy and wants to cancel it.

The premise of Christmas is the freedom to chose between good and evil, Santa made a list and only the nice ones receive his gifts. Christmas is the season when joy must be deserved, it is the season that celebrates the birth of Jesus, a man who taught us that we are all equal and free to chose, a man who at the end gave his life to eliminate the evil represented by the pretense of an original sin defined by evil people to impose their power on others using guilt as their main weapon.

No matter if you look at the Christian faith as believer or simply as an observer of human and political changes, in both ways the meaning of Christmas is clear. The reason why a lot of powerful people is trying to cancel Christmas is exactly to eliminate that meaning.

To be good must be a choice and as a choice we are good toward people deserving it. It’s a season to donate to other deserving people, the nice on Santa’s list. It’s the season to celebrate the fact that we as human are equal and none of us must be considered inferior or guilty for something other people did.

We are in an era when some people in powerful positions want us to believe the opposite of Christmas. They want us to believe we are guilty because we were born with a specific color of our skin, they want us to believe we are guilty if we do not chose to follow their stupidity of the moment also if we see it clearly and think it’s evil, they want us to believe is their right to rule us also when the rules are wrong, they want us to forget reason and substitute our believes in freedom with their believes in controlling us. They want to cancel the basis of freedom and cancel a popular tradition easy to understand by everybody as Christmas, it’s an easy way, much easier than debating the centuries of philosophy that created the western culture of freedom. They want us to forget our power to give to whom deserve, they want us to give them the power to steal all our money so they can decide who is worth of receiving.

In Christmas we can find all the words to express the best of the human kind: freedom, generosity, joy, equality, love, responsibility, choice, etc. etc. They want to substitute all with the new language they use to rule us: a limited freedom, fair share, guilty joy, equity, duty, settled science and so on.

It’s a war, and it’s a war we can win and are winning. To win it we have just to keep to ourselves our values and love for life and give nothing to them. They cannot enjoy Christmas, we can and we must not make the mistake to share it with undeserving people. To win we must not just chant “Let’s go Brandon”, we must deeply feel it and act accordingly.

On the technical side I had some fun using an 8×10″ view camera, a Black and White film, printing in the darkroom and hand painting the image. A video of that will come soon on YouTube… if my GoPro worked properly!

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(Click on the image to open a large version)

…I woke up sweating from the nightmare, I was sitting on my couch and I immersed myself in my beloved reality.

Some years the Christmas reality is happier than the others, this year for me some sadness is in the air filling everything with the emptiness left by the people I loved and are no more with me. But still all is real and I will never change it with a fake safe zone. I love reality because I know I can rationally deal with it and I can follow some little Christmas rituals, as setup a family traditional stone carved Nativity, to still feel the presence of the persons who gave me my life and helped me to become who I’m today.

Christmas is the moment to forget the sadness and get ready to reborn being in charge of our own life. It is the moment to find the joy in everything around us and start planning the future with the blessing of the days getting longer.

Christmas is the moment to realize our uniqueness is the most important gift we have, and no matter what the other people will think, is time to appreciate it and to let it grow.
No matter if your uniqueness is a red nose or anything else, there will always be people joking about it and sometime their jokes are essential to realize what is that differentiate us from the others.

Christmas is the moment to ask for gifts, and start to work to deserve them, so we can transform a red nose from a joke to an essential skill to make the world a better place.

Christmas is the time to look at the others with understanding, it is the time to see the good in the people and their good intentions. It’s time to quit to confuse romantic approaches and harassment.

Christmas is the time for joy working all together for a better world and possibly forget bureaucracy if just for a week.

Christmas is also the time to evaluate the year and distinguish who had been nice and who had been naughty. It is time to do it looking at the reality of an year that went by, with the good and the bad moments, and the good at the bad people we found on our path.

Christmas is the time to give gifts and to give coal, and check it twice to understand who really deserves it, it’s the time to make peace with the year that is almost gone and get our minds ready for a new year to be lived at fullest.

May this Christmas bring you joy and the New Year the realization of your dreams.