Tomorrow is Christmas: “Christmas” (Francesco De Gregori)

Just to be correct and precise, “Natale” by Francesco De Gregori is neither one of his best works nor – much less – a great Christmas song. In it, in fact, the Event is the background, it is the atmosphere.
So, you will say, why include it among the songs to be commented on and not “only” in the list of the many more or less famous songs linked, perhaps in the collective imagination and without concrete reasons, to Christmas?
Because the atmosphere also matters at Christmas. And in De Gregori’s text it is clear how the awareness of the approach of December 25th, although free from religious references, gives a different weight to life. To his joys, to his bitterness. To his certainties, to his absences. And because there are few artists who, like De Gregori, can say so simply, describing any story of any distance, that we need others.
Especially at Christmas, especially when…
“There is the moon on the roofs
there is night on the street
the girls return by tram
I bet it snows
in two days it’s Christmas
I bet it’s cold”

There are few who, without slipping into rhetoric, tell how deep within man there is a need for an “other”. Which for those who believe becomes flesh precisely in the Event of Christmas, changing the history and perspectives of everything. And for those who don’t believe? There the matter is different, of course. But not so much, if even those who believe, thinking of a distant love, son, father, feel the weight of absence.
And De Gregori sings this with a “Christmas” sweetness: without telling us if he is talking about a love, a son or a father because – perhaps – he is talking about us.
We, men facing Christmas, with human hopes to hold on to.
Because hope is everything, and then hope also innervates the profound meaning of Christmas, that magical wait for the Event. And even if only a little, hope begins to color the world too. When “people move fast” and “time passes slowly”, when “in two days it’s Christmas / and it’s not going well and it’s not going bad”, and you want to say “goodnight”, and then a “come back soon” escapes, and in the end you sign with a – casual? – «so be it».

This song is taken from the book “Le musiche del Natale” by Andrea Pedrinelli, courtesy of the author and publisher Ancora.