GironaChristmas is a time of family and traditions. Beating the uncle with a cane is the most typical and indigenous one, but little by little, in Catalan homes, other customs of foreign origin have been gaining prominence, such as Father Christmas, who comes from northern Europe and the United States. Faced with this growing presence of the symbolism of Santa Claus in Christmas celebrations, in 2009 the Komando Tió was born spontaneously: a collective that arose in the Bisbal d’Empordà that, imitating with a sense of humor and parody the aesthetics of a terrorist group, encouraged the Catalan people to “defend the tió and revolt against the imperialism of the red belly”.
With balaclavas, plaid shirts, beretina, distorted voices, epic messages and bombastic rhetoric, they stuck stumps through the streets of the town and hung inflatable Santa Clauses from the public road, spreading their actions on Facebook. The initiative, with a joking tone, but a powerful underlying message, generated a lot of followers and several “squads” from all over the Catalan Countries joined the campaign.
In 2016, however, they retired and took a break, until, this year, they returned to the charge, again from the Bisbal, with a forceful statement on Instagram. “We have seen how Santa Claus, general of the consumerist army, infiltrated the balconies and streets of our country again with his parasitic nest loaded with marketing and globalization. That is why the Komando Tió officially declares the truce broken,” five masked members of the Komando said on camera at the beginning of December. And they add: “We return to the symbolic actions of high risk and low logistics to fill Bisbal with stumps, barretines and our native dignity”.
“Every wand is a shot to imperialism”
Those responsible for the revival are about twenty young Bisbalans, some of whom were already responsible for the original struggle – now with children in the family – and other new additions. They remain anonymous in order to give play to the staging of an armed group (in this case harmless) and thus generate more anticipation, although in a small town like the capital of Baix-Empordane, bearing in mind that they hang banners and figures in public streets without permission, they prefer to keep the name silent.
“We understand the uncle as an anti-capitalist and anti-globalization, millennial, deep-rooted resistance that speaks our language, so every caning is a shot in the foot to imperialism and fund volturism that destroys the countryside,” the Komando spokesman tells ARA, remaining firm at all times in the staging of the character.
The resurgence of the Komando Tió began to heat up just a year ago, when the group Fetus, also from the Bisbal d’Empordà and involved in the survival of Catalan traditions, for the Christmas greeting of the left-wing pro-independence group Nexe Nacional, made a video on the networks that went viral, reproducing this same stirring and grandiloquent speech.
Catalan traditions in danger
According to Komando’s pamphlet argument, feeding the trunks with mandarin peels or nuts, then beating them to shit while singing songs, is an act of resistance against capitalist society, which, in their opinion, embodies the figure of Father Christmas: “He is dressed in the colors of Coca-Cola and turbo-capitalism”, they say.
Since the lights were switched on, in La Bisbal they have already taken “symbolic actions of high risk and low logistics” such as hanging banners with the slogan “Fora el panxut vermelal” on the bridge – removed by the local police because they were not authorized – or spreading slogans on the public road. They also prepare some stronger ones. Night or day, the neighbors who hook them up in fraganti they often laugh or poke at them, while the kids don’t quite get it. “We are addressing the adults: the nanny is not responsible for it. It is about the families imbuing the house with feelings for the uncle and rejecting the colonizing red bellies,” reiterates the spokesman.
Behind all this crazy and almost theatrical paraphernalia, however, there is a fierce defense of Catalan traditions. No ridicule of domestic folklore. From the specific case of tió, which is unique in the world, but can also be extrapolated to other festivals such as the castanada, which is increasingly consumed by Halloween. “Catalan traditions are in danger. If we don’t defend them, no one will. Little by little we are losing weight, everything is becoming folklorized and it seems that, since we live in a global world, things have to be swallowed up. But Catalan is spoken here, whether we like it or not. And recovering the ancestral sap that personifies the tió is a defense of our roots and our culture,” the group defends.
At the moment, new squadrons have not yet officially emerged from all over Catalonia, but they have already received intentions from towns such as Sant Cugat or Palafrugell. “We call for him to join the cause Zionist”, Komando concludes.
