Merry Christmas!
Even though it's been a trying year, it's Christmas!
Even if, you with Covid, and we with the war, we have both struggled a lot, but alas it's Christmas!
The birth of Jesus still remains the only Hope for humanity.
I wish you all the best with a beautiful story taken from the stories of Don Camillo. I wish each of you "to feel the warmth of the holy baby in the hollow of your hand".
Merry Christmas, and happy 2021.
Fr Aurelio
It was now Christmas and it was necessary to urgently take out the figurines of the Nativity scene, clean them, retouch them with color and repair the dents. It was already late, but Don Camillo was still working in the rectory. He heard a knock on the window and, shortly after, he went to open it because he saw it was Peppone.
Peppone sat down while Don Camillo resumed his chores and both were silent for quite a while.
Don Camillo began to touch up St. Joseph's beard with white paint, then he moved on to touch up his robe.
"Do you have much longer?" Peppone inquired with fury.
"If you give me a hand it will move faster and I will finish quicker."
Peppone was a mechanic and had hands as big as shovels and huge fingers that struggled to bend. However, when someone had a stopwatch to fix, they had to go to Peppone, because it is the big men who are made to fix the very small things.
“Imagine! Now I'm going to paint the saints! " he muttered.
"You didn't take me for the sexton!"
Don Camillo fished at the bottom of the box and pulled up a pink thing, the size of a sparrow, and it was the baby Jesus himself.
Peppone found his statuette in his hand without knowing how and then he took a brush and began to work.
He on this side and Don Camillo on the other side of the table, without seeing each other because there was, between them, the glare of the lamp.
“Nobody can be trusted if one means something. I don't even trust myself ”said Peppone.
Don Camillo was very absorbed in his work: the whole face of the Madonna had to be redone, Tedious work.
"And do you trust me?" Asked Don Camillo with indifference.
"I do not know".
"Try to ask me something, so you can see for yourself."
Peppone finished the eyes of the Bambinello: the most difficult thing.
Then he refreshed the red of the lower lip.
"You are scared?"
"I have never in this world been afraid!"
“I do, Peppone. Sometimes I'm afraid "
Peppone dipped the brush.
"Well, sometimes I am too" said Peppone and just heard Don Camillo sigh as well.
Now Peppone had finished the baby Jesus' face and was going over the pink of the body.
By now the baby Jesus was finished and, fresh in color and so pink and clear, he seemed to shine in the middle of Peppone's huge dark hand.
Peppone looked at him and thought he felt the warmth of that little body on his palm.
He delicately placed the pink baby on the table and Don Camillo placed the Madonna beside him.
"My baby is learning Christmas poetry," Peppone proudly announced. “I feel that every night his mother passes it over to him before he falls asleep. It is a phenomenon ”.
Don Camillo, near the Madonna bent over the baby Jesus and placed the statuette of the donkey.
"This is Peppone's son, this is Peppone's wife and this is Peppone" said Don Camillo, touching the donkey last.
"And this is Don Camillo!" Peppone exclaimed, taking the statuette of the ox and placing it near the group.
"Bah! Among beasts we always understand each other ”concluded Don Camillo.
Leaving, Peppone found himself in the gloomy night of the Po, but by now he was very calm because he still felt the warmth of the baby Jesus in the hollow of his hand. Then he heard the words of the poem that he knew by heart ringing in his ear. "When, on Christmas Eve, he tells me, it will be a wonderful thing!" He rejoiced.
The river flowed placidly and slowly, just a few steps away, under the embankment, and it was also a poem that began when the world began and that still continued. It took a thousand years to round and smooth the smallest of the billions of stones at the bottom of the water, and only in twenty generations will the water have smoothed out a new pebble. In a thousand years, people will run at six thousand kilometers an hour on super-atomic rocket machines and for what? To get to the end of the year and be amazed in front of the same plaster baby that, one of these evenings, comrade Peppone painted with a brush.
