Growing up in the 80s in South America to an American father and an Ecuadorean mother meant Christmas was a hodgepodge of traditions probably closest to what one would experience in Hawaii.
Perhaps that’s why Mele Kalikimaka by Bing Crosby would be a recurring tune in our vinyl record player for days preceding the holidays. My parents loved music, and on special occasions like dinner parties, Thanksgiving, and Christmas us kids would be tasked with putting on the shiny black records on the player every evening or before guests arrived. They were happy times, even if most of the year was not.
Our house was large, and in the living room, across from the shiny, velvet champagne-colored 70s sofa and armchairs stood our Christmas tree, next to the piano. It was plastic and overly-decorated with ornaments my mom had collected over the years during her many shopping trips to the USA (buying ornaments was one of her favourite past-times). We would almost always spend our summer holidays in Florida and every now and then travel up north to visit friends and family; she walked into Christmas shops even in the middle of summer to get another ornament for her collection.
Putting the lights on the tree was always an ordeal…what seemed like endless strings of lights stuck into little cardboard wedges in their original boxes had to be wrapped around every little branch, because she wanted it that way. It took forever, and it was also painful, because the spiky fake spruce needles would always poke our little fingers. But she would not relent until after the task was done and all the ornaments were up, equally spaced among branches, and finally, the shiny Christmas star was put on top always with the help of a ladder. Perhaps more fun than decorating the tree was putting out the intricate Nativity, centred around the pastoral village of Bethlehem on an earth and green-coloured reusable paper we used to simulate the ground. We would set out little plastic goats and sheep, sheep-herders, other miniature villagers inside and around their tiny houses and shops, and of course the manger with the 3 Kings, Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. I would spend hours arranging and re-arranging these little figures always creating an imaginary story in my head of who they were in real life and how they went about their life.
Our family seemed happier over Christmas, probably because my parents would put their quarrels on hold, which, in turn, made everyone else happy. I think it’s because both my mom and dad loved Christmas so much that they momentarily forgot about all the things they constantly fought about. I’m sure the jolly Christmas tunes helped calm our otherwise troubled spirits. ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas’ and ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas’ were my favourites, with more traditional tunes like ‘Noel’ and ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ playing intermittently with jolly songs like ‘Rudolph the red-nose reindeer’, ‘Frosty the snowman’, and ‘Here comes Santa’ for almost 2 weeks leading up until Christmas.
The night before Christmas my parents would always leave out a glass of milk and a cookie. Even though my dad never drank milk, the next morning most of the milk would be gone and the cookie half eaten. I remember always trying to unwrap my presents at 5 a.m. under the dusk light of a tropical morning on the Equator. Wearing my pyjamas, I would sneak out of the bedroom and crawl under the tree, carefully trying to open the folded, taped corners of boxed presents (but never succeeding). I actually believed in Santa until I was 12, when my brother and sister cruelly broke the news to me in the cold concrete staircase that went from the garage to the kitchen so that our parents wouldn’t hear us. I was heartbroken.
My mom knew I did this so she would always afore-scold me the night before ‘no peeking!!’. For some reason my brother and sister didn’t seem as enthused or curious. I was always the one who would impatiently lie in bed until 7 a.m. and then rush into my parents’ room and wake them up so we could open presents, perhaps because I was the youngest. The whole process would take less than an hour and afterwards my dad would make his traditional ‘Sunday’ breakfast: fried sausage links, eggs scrambled or over-easy, his famous sautéed breakfast potatoes with onions and fresh parsley, and toast with butter and jam.
The rest of the day always seemed a little anti-climactic, but when we were young we got to play with toys we had unwrapped and later in the day have a nice Christmas meal, usually honey-cured ham brought from the USA by my dad, as well as his signature German potato salad with fried bacon bits, sautéed onions, boiled eggs, and a sweet glaze sauce. In a way, I think I looked as much forward to the meal as I did to the presents.
Some years we would spend Christmas at our tiny beach house on the Pacific coast, in Punta Blanca, a stone’s throw from the ocean; this was my dad’s favourite place on earth and where his ashes were spread in 2016. We would play Christmas tunes but instead of a huge tree, we would just put up a little plastic tree with less decorations, and hang our hand-made felt stockings on the fireplace, which he built out of stone slabs for those chilly nights on the coast when the temperature would drop into the high 60s. We each got a handful of gifts but it was nothing over-the-top like what you see now. I think that was mostly because most of our gifts were bought in the States during my dad’s business trips and they all had to come back in a reasonably-sized suitcase. My favourite were always the stocking stuffers, more bang for the buck, more stuff to open, more surprises. The living room was cramped as we all sat on our wicker furniture adorned with pink and turquoise cushions. We would hear the waves crashing against the shore, and somehow we knew Christmas wasn’t really supposed to be that way, with sunshine, palm trees, a warm sea breeze, and plastic trees. But we didn’t care. The cramped living room was always a mess after opening presents, with crumbled wrapping floating everywhere.
I do miss those Christmases growing up. It seems ages since I’ve had a truly happy Christmas. Maybe it’s because this innocent happiness is something only kids are able to experience. Or maybe it’s because I’ve changed. Or we all have. Maybe Christmas means something else these days. Back then, everything was simpler, even the joy of Christmas.
In the meantime, I like to listen to those old holiday tunes and remember my childhood Christmases in Ecuador, tropical style, and once in a blue moon, when the Christmas radio plays Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas in Hawaiian), I can’t help but get a nostalgic smile on my face.
P.S. This is a picture of my dad’s last Christmas in 2014, in Florida. He loved Christmas.
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