Juan Villoro
Sometimes the customs of a famous country are celebrated in another with little resemblance to it and is unlikely to carry them out.
I refer, of course, to Christmas, a pagan rite that centuries later became associated with Christianity and later with the New England colonists’ taste for giving thanks by eating turkeys (although Thanksgiving takes place in November, its gastronomic impact extends to Christmas Eve). In Mexico, all of this is exotic, which increases the enthusiasm for participating in the confusion.
In my childhood, there was more emphasis on Three Kings Day than on Christmas Eve. But the proximity to the United States brought the gift-giving forward to December 24. Like many sports heroes replaced by an upstart, Baby Jesus was replaced by Santa Claus.
Every culture is made up of mixtures. The curious thing is not that we have taken on foreign habits but that we do so with passionate enthusiasm as if sleds pulled the homeland’s destiny.
There is no way for the evidence to mitigate our winter passion.
It is warm in most parts of the country in December, and at noon the sun is beating down; in this weather, children draw snowy landscapes in schools, and cars are decorated with fake reindeer antlers. On television, advertisers report that seasonal Mexicans are blond, wear scarves, ice skate and give away the most expensive whisky. After the commercials, The Grinch is aired for the umpteenth time.
What has that got to do with us? The Mexican landscape does not abound with Christmas trees; if you spot more than ten, that qualifies as a National Park. However, to satisfy our Nordic cravings, nurseries have sprung up offering fir trees in sizes ranging from S to XL. The alternative option is to buy a plastic tree made in Taiwan that is dismantled after Epiphany and stored in the lumber room until the following Christmas.
The fact that Santa Claus comes from the North Pole puts children’s belief systems to the test – how does he get through the capital’s traffic, park his sleigh and enter houses where there is no chimney?
The Christmas diet also contravenes customs. Perhaps influenced by the peaceful atmosphere, we eat less hot peppers than ever, we prepare cod without much idea of how to remove the bones, and for hours we inject wine and spices into a turkey that no one will know how to slice. Why don’t we appeal to our millennial culinary wisdom? My guess is that we don’t want to deprive ourselves of the sense of extravagance that Christmas brings – is there anything weirder than being happy in the company of relatives we have avoided all year? This exquisite sense of the unreal is reinforced if we eat weird things.
For years, my father was in charge of carving the turkey because he had two years of medical school and could tell a muscle from a nerve. He was replaced by a cousin who was a noted taxidermist until one day, he broke his arm, and I had to take over the job. From the symbolic turkey, we moved on to the abstract.
Is there nothing Mexican on the menu? To prove that we haven’t lost our identity, we include two dishes we don’t try all year again: romeritos and huauzontles. These are vegetables dipped in thick mole sauce, difficult to chew and harder to digest. They are not the stars of the night; we accept them as supporting actors who remind us, in an uncomfortable but necessary way, that we have not forgotten our vernacular essences.
The gastronomic disorder leads to peladillas (hard candy-coated almonds), and turrón de Alicante which explains why there are so many dentists on duty on Silent Night.
Will the future bring new features to the fiesta? Yes, provided they are alien to us. Mexico, as the poet Ramón López Velarde wanted, is “faithful to its daily mirror” throughout the year, but takes a holiday from itself on Christmas Eve.
The reason seems to be the following: we are convinced that happiness comes from far away. Surrounded by bad news, we long for a distant glow to light up the sky.
Like the strange couple who found the kindness of the unknown in Nazareth, at Christmas, we do our best to feel like foreigners in our own home and thus discover a surprising way of being ourselves.
This was published in Spanish by Reforma on December 23, 2022.
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