Carol and Roger have been coming to Italy for more than two decades, but we have never been here for the Christmas season…until this year. As the home of the Catholic Church, we assumed Italy would celebrate Christmas differently than in the United States, but we didn’t know how.
Christmas Season
Unlike in the USA, the “Christmas season” does not begin before Thanksgiving and creep earlier onto the calendar with each passing year. In Italy, it’s well-defined and has been for centuries.
It begins on December 8th, with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception..a national holiday. In the Catholic tradition, that’s the date the Virgin Mary was conceived free of original sin.
The season ends on January 6th with the feast of the Epiphany…in Catholic lore the day the three Magi visited the baby Jesus.
Gift Giving
While Christmas in the USA is…in our observation…more of a commercial than a religious holiday, that is not the case in Italy.
Gift-giving on Christmas day is certainly becoming more common, thanks to the influence of American popular culture.
More traditionally, gifts are given on Epiphany …when the witch Befana stuffs good children’s stockings with goodies and misbehaving children’s stockings with a lump of coal.
Christmas markets are common all across Italy.
In neighboring Montepulciano the booths sold wine, handcrafts, and…most commonly… Christmas sweets.
Decorations
If the small towns in Tuscany go overboard with anything for Christmas, it’s with decorations.
This is Pienza’s main street…
… One of it’s restaurants…
…And the piazza in front of the Cathedral.
Christmas trees are not a long-standing tradition. Before WWII, they were extremely rare.
The Vatican put up its first tree in 1982, when Pope John Paul II brought a Polish tradition to Rome.
Our friends do not have trees in their homes; trees are largely in public places.
Nativity scenes are more common than Christmas trees and date back much farther. Many, like this one in Lucca, are populated by real people rather than statues.
In the run-up to Christmas, nativity scenes…like the one in Pienza’s Chiesa San Francesco…are missing something…
Baby Jesus.
He doesn’t get added to the display until midnight mass on Christmas Eve.
Christmas Eve
One of the oldest Christmas eve traditions in Pienza is the bonfire in the piazza outside the duomo. Traditionally, the bonfire has been lit right after the end of early mass, when a crowd exiting the church could gather. This year at least, COVID and a light rain kept the crowd sparse. At midnight, a group of twenty-somethings gathered under the portico of city hall, out of the rain, to celebrate together.
Babo Natale (Father Christmas) had been conspicuous by his total absence from Pienza until Christmas Eve. (How different is that?)
He put in a brief appearance to be photographed with his “grandchildren” and then disappeared into the night.
Christmas Eve ended with Midnight Mass.
In a country where church-going is even less common than in the United States, a fair-sized crowd turned out to welcome in the holiday.
Christmas Day
Christmas Day is a day spent with family.
Late Christmas morning, the streets of Pienza were empty. Carol pointed out, the women in the family were all home cooking.
Roger assumed if the women were cooking, the men were therefore watching soccer on TV. But alas, no soccer games scheduled on Christmas Day! (How different is that?)
As Carol and Roger walked through town, everything was buttoned up tight…
…except for La Poste, their favorite place to get a cup of coffee…and Pienza’s version of Cheers.
And true to tradition, the Nativity scene in Chiesa San Francesco now contained the baby Jesus.
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