Las Christmas Read Free

occasional episodes of
Bonanza
dubbed into Spanish: I liked to watch the lips move out of sync with the voice that said, “
Vámonos,
Hoss!” And by 1966 there would be a TV in the seventh-grade classroom at Arturo Lluberas Junior High, down near Yauco, where the older girls would crowd in to watch
El Show del Mediodía.
But in Indiera and Rubias nobody was hooked on TV Christmas specials yet, so when the season began, people still tuned up their
cuatros
and guitars, took down the
güiros
and maracas and started going house to house looking for free drinks. So while Don Lencho kept opening the oven to baste the pig, Chago and Nestor and Papo played
aguinaldos
and
plenas
and Carmencita improvised lyrics back and forth with Papo, each trying to top the other in witty commentary, the guests hooting and clapping when one or the other scored a hit. No one talked much about Cheíto and Luis away in Vietnam, or Adita’s fiancé running off with a pregnant high-school girl a week before the wedding or Don Toño coughing up blood all the time. “
Gracias a Dios,
” said Doña Gina, “
aquí estamos.
”
    During Navidades the cars of city relatives started showing up parked in the road next to the red and green jeeps. My girlfriends had to stay close to home and wear starched dresses, and the boys looked unnaturally solemn in ironed white shirts, with their hair slicked down. Our relatives were mostly in New York, but sometimes a visitor came all that way, announced ahead of time by letter, or, now and then, adventurous enough to try finding our farm with just a smattering of Spanish and a piece of paper with our names.
    The neighbors grew their own
gandules
and plantain, but, except for a few vegetables, we didn’t farm our land. My father drove to San Juan every week to teach at the university and did most of our shopping there, at the Pueblo supermarket on the way out of town. Sometimes all those overflowing bags of groceries weighed on my conscience, especially when I went to the store with my best friend, Tata, and waited while she asked Don Paco to put another meager pound of rice on their tab. My father was a biologist and a commuter. This was how we got our frozen blintzes and English muffins, fancy cookies and date-nut bread.
    But during Navidades it seemed, for a little while, as if everyone had enough. My father brought home Spanish
turrón—
sticky white nougat full of almonds, wrapped in thin edible layers of papery white stuff. The best kind is the hard
turrón
you have to break with a hammer. Then there were all the gooey, intensely sweet fruit-pastes you ate with crumbly white cheese. The dense, red-brown
guayaba;
golden mango; sugar-crusted, pale brown
batata;
and dazzlingly white coconut. And my favorite,
dulce de naranja,
a tantalizing mix of bitter orange and sugar, the alternating tastes always startling on the tongue. We didn’t eat pork, but my father cooked canned corned beef with raisins and onions and was the best Jewish
tostón
maker in the world.
    Christmas trees were still a strange gringo custom for most of our neighbors, but each year we picked something to decorate, this household of transplanted New Yorkers—my Puerto Rican mother, my Jewish father, and the two, then three of us, “
americanitos
” growing up like wild
guayabas
on an overgrown and half-abandoned coffee farm. One year we cut a miniature grove of bamboo and folded dozens of tiny origami cranes in gold and silver paper to hang on the branches. Another year it was the tightly rolled, flame-red flowers of
señorita
with traditional, shiny Christmas balls glowing among the lush green foliage. Sometimes it was boughs of Australian pine hung with old ornaments we brought with us from New York in 1960, those pearly ones with the inverted cones carved into their sides like funnels of fluted, silver and gold light.
    The only telephone was the one at the crossroads, which