Las Christmas
Table of Contents
Puerto Rican Tostones con Mojito
Pasteles de Arroz y de Gallina
You
are invited to spend Christmas at our
house . . .
Introduction
IN THE SPANISH-SPEAKING AMERICAS, Christmas is much more than a one-day event followed by a staggering credit card bill. The festivities last for weeks, beginning well before Christmas, and continuing straight through to the arrival of the Three Kings and the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. Las Navidades involves a lot more partying and a lot less shopping than a U.S. Christmas.
In Mexico, the celebration officially starts on December 16, when the wanderings of Mary and Joseph are commemorated with the
posadas,
candlelit processions which take place for the nine nights leading up to Christmas Eve. Children lead the parade, carrying a litter displaying clay figurines that represent Joseph and Mary on their burro, and the angel who followed them on their journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Outside the house of the evening's host, they sing the song of Joseph, asking for a place to spend the night, while inside the house, the host, playing the role of the innkeeper, sings back, turning them down, telling them to go away. At last, realizing the identity of his holy guests, the host sings a welcoming final verse, and opens the door. The party moves inside, where there are drinks, sweetsâand a piñata for the children to break.
Something similar takes place in Puerto Rico, where the religious origins of the
parrandas
have been all but forgotten, while the tradition of going from house to house remains. The songs that accompany the
parrandas
refer less to the journey of Mary and Joseph and focus more on the quickly disappearing traditions of Puerto Rican rural life, including the foods typically prepared for Navidades.
In the tropical climates of the Caribbean and the temperate climes of South America, where Christmas falls smack in the middle of summer, there is no Santa arriving on a sleigh, no jingle bells in the snow, no stockings hung on the mantel with care. It's a holiday for family, for grown-ups as well as children, celebrated with plenty of traditional food, drink, music, and dance.
Nochebuena, Christmas Eve, is the night for
la misa del gallo,
“the rooster's mass,” which begins at midnight. In Mexico, the mass is usually followed by fireworks and the ringing of bells, after which everyone goes home to enjoy a big feast.
Children nowadays receive gifts on Christmas Day, but they also wait until the night of January 5 to put out not their stockings but their shoes, filled with sweet grass to feed the camels. Their gifts come courtesy not of a fat man in a red suit but of
los tres reyes,
the Three Kings. The gifts of the Magi are visited upon these children, in commemoration of the gifts brought to the Christ child. The holidays finally end the next day with the Feast of the Epiphany. In Mexico, families serve the
rosca de reyes,
a traditional wreath-shape cake filled with spices, dried fruit, and one tiny doll, representing the baby Jesus. Whoever finds the doll in his or her slice has to host the next feast, which is not very far offâCandelmas, on February 2.
Traditions like these became a part of my life in my role as editor of Sà magazine, which folded at the end of 1996. We had a great time with that final issue, not only because we knew it would be our last, but because it focused on Christmas, and the many ways in which the holiday is celebrated in Latin America. Eight leading Latino authors were invited to contribute short Christmas memories for a special section. We attempted to offer equal time to memories from South and Central America and the Spanish Caribbean, and to memories of growing up in the Statesâa Mexican-American in San Francisco, a Cuban-American in Miamiâwhere traditions are maintained, transformed, or lost. We expected to get a lovely kaleidoscope of holiday pictures, describing traditional celebrations from the many cultures labeled “Latino”âwarm, fuzzy stories of singing Puerto Rican
aguinaldos,
parading in candlelight
posadas,
and feasting on Cuban
lechón,
sweet, crispy Mexican
buñuelos,
and hot chocolate
atole.
But the stories that came back to us were not always jolly portraits of childhood celebrations. Christmas, we discovered, touches off a full range of feelings. That most highly anticipated of holidays, when families are expected to convene in an atmosphere of great abundance, perfect love, and unmitigated joy, can also be a setup for disappointment, a ripe atmosphere for drama. All the elements that make up a child's world become magnified by the exigencies of Christmas.
For a poor child there is no ecstatic Christmas morning, no tearing through a staggering pile of gifts. For a child newly arrived in the States, colliding with a strange culture is never more bewildering than in that first confrontation with the excesses of an American Christmas. And even in the best of circumstances, family reunions are rarely conflict-free. There may be a
tÃo
who drinks too much rum, a crazy aunt, an estranged father, obnoxious cousins. And Christmas can be a time of bitter revelation, when adults become too distracted to maintain the facade they normally use to shield a child from grown-up reality.
The stories we received for that holiday issue were threaded together by a string of confusion and misfortune. The authors' reactions to the holiday foibles and sorrows they faced ranged from poignant to hilarious: from Estela Herrera's anguished tale of her pet goat to Jaime Manrique's sardonic account of his aunt's attempted suicide. And there was the sense of wonder, too, the small child's astonished response to the magic of it all.
We realized that the scope of emotions engendered by remembering Christmas past was far more than we could begin to explore in a magazine feature. Esmeralda Santiago and I had become friends through the evolution of SÃ magazine, and her story led the section that appeared in that holiday issue. Together we began to expand on those memories. This book is the result of our yearlong collaboration.
We invited more authors to contribute memories, and once again we looked for writers with a variety of geographic origins. We invited friends, colleagues, authors whose work we admired, writers we'd always wanted to meet. This time we knew that we could expect to find a commonality of experience that transcended ethnicity. Still, we were stunned by the intensity of many of the pieces we received.
As the stories arrived, we felt as though each writer had sent us a Christmas gift. As we read each one, it was like unwrapping an unexpected present, and we marveled that we were given the privilege of sharing something so intensely personal. The stories were like secrets told to a close friend. “This is what it was like when I was little. This is what my family was like. This is how it seemed to me as a child.”
Given the chance to write longer pieces, the authors used Christmas as a springboard to describe experiences common to all people: poverty, alienation, loss of innocence, a child's growing awareness of life's harshness. Gary Soto remembered the meager Christmas of a boy raised on welfare. Michael Nava opened our eyes to the feelings of a child at a charity Christmas party. Julia Alvarez described the moment when the terror of living in a dictatorship first cracked the protective seal of a child's world. When there was humor in the stories, it was often derived from specifically Latino experiences, from the absurdity of clashing culturesâIlan Stavans's account of latkes with mole in Mexico City, Francisco Goldman's memory of
posadas
in Newton, Massachusetts, Ray Suárez's tale of tropical
aguinaldos
in a frozen Chicago.
And the warmth and joy of the holiday was there, as well. Memories of good food are intrinsically happyâPuerto Rican author Rosario Morales remembers her mother's
asopao
simmering on the stove. Colombian poet Jaime Manrique has not forgotten his family's delicious Christmas
pasteles.
As we read the stories, Esmeralda and I found ourselves hungry for the dishes mentioned. What makes Ilan Stavans's grandmother's
pescado a la veracruzana
so special that he still remembers it years later and thousands of miles from home? Why is MartÃn Espada's alter ego a wrestler named El Pernil? Would it be too much to ask Ilan to phone Mexico City for that fish recipe? And could Jaime please ask his family what was in those
pasteles?
From the many foods mentioned in the Christmas memories, Esmeralda and I developed the idea for a pan-Latino holiday banquet, a menu like no other. We called the authors who, in turn, often called their mothers, their sisters, their aunts. We called our own mothers; we called our friends. We consulted cookbooks and compared notes. Then, on two coasts, the cooking began. In Westchester County, New York, Esmeralda's kitchen was fragrant with the aroma of her
arroz con coco,
while two thousand miles away, trays of anise-scented
bizcochitos
were browning in my Los Angeles oven. We tested the recipes, made adjustments, retested.
Finally, we were ready to prepare our Christmas feast. Esmeralda's friend, Laura Cohen, generously agreed to lend us her spacious kitchen. Other friends were enlisted to help with the preparations. Some ingredients were hard to find in Westchester supermarkets, so I shipped two FedEx boxes full of treasures from the ranch market in my L.A. neighborhood: plantain leaves, chiles,
queso blanco.
I tucked bottles of Pico de Gallo powdered chiles and packets of
achiote
paste into my suitcase and got on a plane.
On the morning of the big day, Esmeralda's mother was on call in Florida, in case we got into trouble with any of the Puerto Rican specialties on our menu. The cooking was a party in itself. Eight women stood around the big kitchen table, wrapping tamales in corn husks, folding plantain leaves into
pastelesâ
old friends and new friends, mothers and daughters, dogs winding their way among eight sets of legs, patrolling the floor, hoping one of us would drop a bit of stuffing.
In the frenzy of the last hour, we waited our turn at the stove, took turns with the blender, chopped onions and tomatoes like a bunch of crazy samurai. Esmeralda decided that this was the moment to ease the tension with a first round of
coquito,
the lethal Puerto Rican coconut-cream-rum drink. Fathers and brothers, little sisters and assorted friends arrived. All the dishes were tasted, most of them highly praised, some of them requiring a bit of adjustment.
At the end of the evening, when we were too tired to move and too tipsy to care, Esmeralda cranked up the music. The women and girls somehow found the energy to jump up and salsa, while the men looked happily, blearily on.
Outside, the first real snow of the season blanketed the lawns. Christmas would arrive again in a few weeks. Looking around that big room full of people, I felt as though I had stepped into the pages of our book, and I was engulfed in a wave of sentimentality. There were dear old friends with whom I had shared decades of my life, children on the verge of adulthood whom I remembered as bulges in their mothers' bellies, new friends who were like sisters to me now. The room was warm from the blaze in the fireplace and the glow of shared pleasures. I was exhausted and sated, feeling the rum. So, I thought, this is Las Navidades. This is what all the fuss is about.
JOIE DAVIDOW