One day Alavedra and I learned from friends of ours that a Catalan Language and Poetry Festival was being arranged in Perpignan. Prizes were to be awarded for original writings in the Catalan tongue. Without telling me, Alavedra submitted a poem he had brought with him in a notebook when he fled across the Pyrenees from Spain. It was a long poem he had written several years before in Barcelona for his five-year-old daughter, Macía. He had, in fact, written it at her request – as a song for them to sing together on Christmas Eve beside the miniature manger they had built together. / At the Festival in Perpignan, Alavedra’s poem was awarded first prize. When I heard it recited there, I was so impressed with its beauty – it was so simple and yet so profound, as is the tale of the Nativity itself – that I made up my mind to put the words of the poem to music. << less