Wearing shorts in front of a Christmas tree. What climate change has only recently made possible in Central Europe is normal in Brazil.

I still don’t get any real Christmas feeling in the tropics, despite all the festooned roads and the Christmas songs being played in shopping malls. And these red hats just look out of place. Some businesses here compel their staff to wear silly hats during work. Even at the Family Court in Salvador two clerks wore red Santa hats while registering petitioners for paternity cases.

Almost all Brazilians have a romantic view of snow, which they have usually never seen in their lives. “Once in my life, I want to see snow, touch snow, eat snow!”, I hear everywhere. When a lawyer colleague in Lauro de Freitas invited me to a barbecue, I almost couldn’t suppress my laughter when I saw how she had decorated her front door, in…