Natale

Natale — Christmas. Twenty-five is the only number in the Smorfia that carries a date: a day, not a figure. In Naples, Christmas isn’t a holiday like any other — it’s the month when the city changes its face, the nativity-scene streets fill up, and every family repeats the same gestures Grandpa used to. The Smorfia put it at twenty-five for the simplest reason in the world, and everything is in that simplicity. In dreams, twenty-five shows up when there’s a homecoming. People who see each other once a year, a tradition repeated the same way, the feeling of coming home even when home has changed. It’s the number of renewal: something that always starts over at the same point on the circle. The images that lead here are homey and full. Christmas. The daughter, who comes home even when she lives far away. And the brazier, the fire of the home, the one you sit around to warm up — the simplest and oldest thing a family does together. There’s a shadow too, and it would be phony not to mention it: the holidays are also when you feel most the absence of those who are gone. If twenty-five has come up in your dream, there was a family in it — the one you have, the one you had, or the one you might have imagined. The Smorfia sets down the number and leaves it to you to recognize which of the three.