Barcelona Letter: It is safe to assume that, until this week in Barcelona, no politician had ever compared the Nativity scene in Bethlehem with Universal Studios' classic 1930s horror movie The Mummy.
But then Barcelona city council has this year deviated from tradition for the first time by commissioning a modern interpretation of the crib which has been met with grunts of disapproval since the moment officials squeaked the bubble-wrapping off the figures.
First of all, it's not exactly a crib. Although it has been erected outside the Palace of Government on Plaça Sant Jaume, as usual, this time there is no roof, there are no animals, and the traditional shepherds and wise men have been replaced by, amongst others, yuppies, hippies, a tourist, a woman in a jumpsuit raking leaves and an old man reading Don Quixote.
Life-size colour photographs of real people, mounted on thick cardboard, have been used to depict these modern guests at the stable in Bethlehem. Their silhouettes can be found sitting on benches, or standing or crouching inside an enclosure of ivy and soil borrowed from Parc Ciutadella, one of the city's largest parks.
Joseph, Mary and Jesus are not represented by images of real people, but by a blown-up photograph of terracotta Nativity figures from the Museu Etnologic. Unfortunately, as the original figures are only a fraction of the size of the photograph, the enlarged faces of the Holy Family seem pock-marked, blurred and strangely expressionless, which may explain why opposition Popular Party politician Alberto Fernando Diaz was upset after paying his annual visit to the crib. "The Holy Family look like something out of The Mummy. This crib is naff, it's rubbish and they should withdraw it," he declared to the press.
Manuel Trallero, a columnist for La Vanguardia newspaper, wrote on Tuesday that the image of Jesús, María y José looked like the work of a taxidermista. He was equally scathing about their trendy visitors.
"They are like the illustrations in a pro-Franco book about the formation of the national spirit. There is no mystery, magic, emotion, heart or life in them. It's just a simple publicity stunt."
The Mayor of Barcelona, Joan Clos, admitted that the crib was "provocative", but backed the council's decision to commission something bold and new.
The Nativity scene was designed by a group of young students at Barcelona's Massana art school under the supervision of their teacher, Isabel Banal, whose name definitely does not match her taste in cribs.
"Back in Naples in the 18th century, there are records of the Holy Family being surrounded by figures of local people in the crib, a custom which extended to the Mediterranean," she said, in her students' defence. "Now we have created something similar that symbolises a fusion of the traditional with the present."
In fact, the end-product is a watered-down version of the original design; two other figures were banned for "reasons of political incorrectness", according to reports.
One was of a lady feeding pigeons, a pastime frowned on by the city council. The other was of a pixar, which is the Catalan colloquialism for a person urinating. (The "x" sound in Catalan is like the "sh" sound in English, so, as you can see, there is not much difference between their colloquialism and ours.)
There was no room at the inn for a pixar, even though the clever students had marketed him as the "urban version of the caganer", whose absence from the crib for the first time this year is greatly lamented by Barcelonans, judging from newspaper and TV reports on the infamous crib.
If you have never heard of a caganer, you may not believe me when I tell you that a crib is considered incomplete in Catalonia if it does not contain the figure of a peasant in a nice red hat, squatting over his bowel movement with his pants around his ankles. Caganer means, well, pooper, and you can buy pooping presidents, pooping footballers, pooping angels and pooping television personalities. The pooper is normally hidden in a back corner of the crib, so he doesn't steal the infant Jesus's limelight. Children then have to hunt for him.
Yesterday, at the modern crib in Plaça Sant Jaume, retired metal worker Roberto Antoni sat next to the cut-out of an old woman knitting a jumper for Jesus. "I have been coming to see the crib here all my life and this is the first time they've ever changed it so much. I can't make head nor legs of it. There might be no caganer, but there's still crap to see here."