Christmas is time of joy for children in all places. After all, you gain gifts and it´s not your birthday! When I was a child, I remember that Christmas was good also because it was certainly the day of the year when I had become dirtier, deliciously dirty. Commonly, my mother passed all day cooking and used to forgot me. Then I could play on trees, with water, land, mud...

Here in Brazil, Christmas is a funny time! Starting, because here it is summer: 40 degrees and more. Just at this time, the Christmas trees here everywhere are full of fake snow (snow on this heat?!?!). Also we see some Santa Claus, poor guys, with hot clothes, enormous hair and beard, and boots! Without speaking that everybody usually eats chestnut, nuts, hazelnuts and other foods that aren´t really for our heat... And over all this, there is a madness to buy things. Shoppings become overcrowded. It is as if to buy was the feeling of Christmas!

It was only few years ago, already an adult, that I found what today represents for me the true spirit of the Christmas. It happened in one little village where I moved myself, back in mountains near to Rio de Janeiro. There weren´t shoppings or christmas trees, with cotton snow. There wasn´t Santa Claus full of heat. The table was not so big, nor had such strange food. And women did not pass hours in the kitchen, cooking all Christmas day. Even because they didn´t have too much to cook.

But, on this place, on Christmas Night there was a Christmas Theater on streets with local people dressed as shepherds, Angel, Maria and Jose, remembering scenes of the Birth of Jesus. Most of the actors were illiterate, but in the end, all were proud for its papers: Maria, Kings or even the shepherds, who made everybody to laugh. Over there I found my Christmas spirit: not just in the mountains, but on simplicity.

Nina Domingues (Nina is a teacher on Brazil, she cooperates with Brazilkids and lived some years ago on Mirantão, a village on mountains, close to Rio De Janeiro. Soon, we´ll be speaking here about Mirantão, a very special place where many cool works for children and youngers are growing).