Category Archives: Seasonal Fare

Seasonal Fare

Asalto Navideño!

I love Puerto Rican Christmas music. One reason is because it is nearly indistinguishable from non-Christmas-y Puerto Rican music. Granted, that is due in large part to my poor knowledge of Spanish. But, it is also indicative of a culture that has a very different view of the holiday than that of most Americans.

Traditional American* Christmas songs are either religious (overtly or tacitly), or they are somewhat gentle in their celebrations of the joy of the season. Christmas is presented as great because snow and jingle bells and presents and stuff. The pleasure you derive from the season is supposed to be a general feeling of Good Will Toward Men.

* I realize I’m getting into thorny territory by saying “American” in contrast to “Puerto Rican” when Puerto Rico is in fact a part of the US of A. Please excuse this shorthand as a means to forestall excessive hyphenation and explanatory adjective chains. 

Puerto Rican Christmas songs, on the other hand, are about more earthly delights. In fact, nearly every one of them is about the unabashed merriment of eating, drinking, dancing, or any combination thereof. Christmas is sung of as a wonderful time of year because you get to do these things with your friends and family.

Of course, everyone parties at the holidays, but ever since Dickens (and maybe earlier), that is not reflected in the art we make about the holiday. Regardless of what we actually do on December 25, we feel compelled to assign a greater, more lofty meaning to Christmas in songs, movies, and stories about it. Admitting that you’re looking forward to taking a Yuletide vacation from moderation is seen as somewhat gauche, if not vaguely blasphemous.

In the world of Puerto Rican Christmas songs, however, there’s no conflict of wondering if we’ve lost “the reason for the season” because partying is the reason for the season.

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Parental Guidance, Seasonal Fare

Ethnic Envy and the Case of the Misidentified Holiday Decoration

This weekend, my daughter presented me with two questions I wasn’t sure how to answer. The first came during a trip to a diner, after I insisted we wrap up the uneaten portion of her meal to bring home. “My nanny* always said, ‘Wasting food is a sin’,” I told her.

“What’s a sin?” she asked. That was a puzzler.

* Our family word for grandma. Don’t judge.

The second unanswerable question came during a trip into the city to do New York-y holiday things, like visit the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and get pressed against strangers’ Starter jackets. (At Manhattan’s biggest tourist attractions, it is always 1993.) This being a weekend, our trip necessitated lots of transfers and waiting for trains to arrive, because Bloomberg needs the money that could go toward a functioning mass transit system to enforce anti-smoking laws and beat up hippies.

While biding our time on a subway platform, my daughter spontaneously sang a cute little song about Hannukkah, to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” It made reference to dreidels and menorahs and latkes and, like most songs sung by a five year old, was adorable. (Later I found out it’s a seasonal staple that, to this point, has escaped my notice.)

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Seasonal Fare

Explaining Your Childhood, Christmas Edition

You can not recognize your natural environment for what it is until you leave it. Example: I grew up believing that I was middle class, because everyone was middle class, right? Therefore, the kids I went to school with, who all got comparatively more toys than me, were rich. The fact that their parents worked non-rich jobs like cop, fireman, and other varieties of civil servant never crossed my mind. Then I went to college and ran into actual Rich Kids for the first time and realized, to my horror, “No, those kids you went to school with were middle class; you were broke.”

This is a tale in the same vein, about a longstanding local Christmas tradition in the Orange County, NY area. And not even the whole county; really, just a concentrated part of it that happened to include my hometown. A farm supply/nursery in New Windsor called Devitt’s hosted an annual holiday attraction called Christmas on the Farm, something to entertain the kiddies while mom and dad shopped for chicken feed and Weed-B-Gone. (Though they were quickly being devoured by housing developments to accommodate the growing needs of White Flight, farms could still be found in the area in them days.) Christmas on the Farm involved petting zoos and Yuletide displays, but the highlight came at the very end, where you got to meet and talk to Eggbert.

Eggbert was an animatronic egg who sat on a large throne and wore a crown. His relation to any aspect of Christmas, religious or secular, was never explained. But it was understood that much like Santa, you told Eggbert what you wanted to see under the tree and he would deliver. Eggbert was voiced by an adult with a microphone, hidden behind one-way glass. Kids were given name tags so when they reached their final destination, Eggbert’s voicer could impart some personalized holiday greetings to them. In kid lore, a trip to Eggbert was not exactly equivalent to a trip to see a Mall Santa, but it was definitely a good way to hedge your bets.

I went to see Eggbert throughout my childhood, and so did every other kid within a 20-mile radius of Devitt’s. That was simply what you did at Christmastime. You questioned it no more than a fish questions the wetness of the ocean.

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