Las Christmas Read Online Free PDF

approached on their camels, bearing gifts. In the foyer my mother placed mirrors and cotton swatches to simulate snow and a frozen lake, which she surrounded with little cottages with red roofs and lights inside. Between early December and the second week in January, this incongruous wintry landscape was the first thing one saw as one entered our Havana home, where even the walls were painted a leafy green.
    The puny imported pines that reached the supermarket where we shopped looked like malnourished imitations of the bushy Carolina balsams I later became accustomed to in the States. They shed needles like rain, and no amount of watering could cure their wan, skeletal look. But to us they were incomparably beautiful. Other kids in the neighborhood, whose parents didn’t put up Christmas trees, came to our house for awed stares. The point was not the tree, anyway, but the decorations, whose abundance more than made up for the gaping holes in the foliage. Because Americans think of Christmas trees as natural objects (and with good reason: they can see them growing), often their idea of decoration is a red ribbon with a pine cone or some paper cutouts that their kids bring home from school. For us, Christmas trees were exotic imported artifacts that provided an opportunity to demonstrate once again the triumph of man over nature, so we smothered them with decorations: blinking lights, endless rosaries of shiny marble-sized balls, and box upon box of ornaments, including some odd ones like a blown-crystal
bohío
(thatched hut). We buried any residual holes under a canopy of
lágrimas,
literally “tears” but in fact tinsel. Tears blanketed our sagging tree like kudzu weeds. The crowning touch was a large, brightly-lit figure of the Archangel Gabriel, who presided over the living room with arms outstretched. My father got up on a ladder and, tottering above my mother’s watchful eye, skewered the angel onto the tree. By the time we were through, several days after we had begun, our formerly spindly tree looked splendid—an anorexic wrapped in jewelry and furs, and with an angelic tiara to boot.
    When my family arrived in the United States in October 1960, we stopped celebrating Nochebuena. It seemed pointless to observe this feast in exile, with our unsettled political situation and the family scattered all over— some relatives still in Cuba and others in New York or Puerto Rico. That first Christmas in Miami we put up a tree, a smaller and greener one, but the only crèche we could afford was a cardboard stable with fold-out figures. Instead of Nochebuena dinner, we had Christmas lunch; instead of the traditional roasted pig, my mother baked a turkey. Sitting around the table on Christmas Day, we weren’t so much gloomy as dazed. We had been living in this house only a few weeks, everything was topsy-turvy, it wasn’t clear what we were supposed to think or say. There we were, just my parents and their four children around the table, suddenly reduced to an American nuclear family. Earlier that morning Santa had left gifts for those of us who still believed in him, but two weeks later the Three Wise Men didn’t show up. I remember hearing my mother tell my little sister that Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthasar had stayed in Cuba.
    By the late sixties almost everybody in our immediate family had left Cuba, and even if they didn’t live in Miami they were still near enough to come down for Christmas. Since we were all together again, it no longer felt inappropriate to celebrate this feast in exile. Indeed, the opposite thing happened: distance from the homeland made us celebrate the occasion all the more vigorously, for Nochebuena became one of the ways of holding on to Cuba. Although the celebrations were less splendid than the old ones, the essentials remained the same. During those years Little Havana was already full of Cuban markets that carried all the typical foods; and if a family