Noche Buena (the good night) is Christmas Eve night, our traditional family and party night. Noche Buena is also a "poinsettia", which is, of course, the Christmas flower. (Capicu.) It is usually kicked off with a traditional family dinner. In our Jersey days, the immediate families would have dinner at home and then trek off to Irvington to Tio Alfonso and Tia Celina's to party their asses off. But whether it was at Tia's or at home, the Christmas feast was probably keynoted by a Lechon ("Pernil" or Roast Pig) and Arroz (rice) con Gandules (pigeon peas) or rice and beans (and, in keeping with Tio's Cuban heritage they would be black beans), pasteles, morcilla, and, for dessert, arroz con dulce and a ton of other sweets.
THE HOLIDAY MEAL
"Jibaro" (Puerto Rico) and "Guajiro" (Cuba) are terms for the common Ever'man that can be both nostalgic reminiscences or, like "redneck", epithets. They romanticize our agrarian past (and sanitize more trying times. Peruse, for example the lyrics to "Lamento Borincano") So it's no wonder that wherever those members of our diaspora congregate - and my family is in every part of the United States, France, and Belgium - we try to recreate the shiny facets of our culture's past. We dance, we sing, we party, and we eat. And that includes pork, the mainstay of our diet. No Christmas would be complete without a pernil, preferably cooked over an open pit.
I miss my family. "The visit" was an at-least-once-weekly occurrence and, especially so during holidays. An ever-ubiquitous function was the sun around which our family orbited. So, during the holidays especially, I do a lot of reminiscing. We all do. And sometimes we go beyond nostalgia and try to recreate those times.
One year we traveled to Tampa where my cousins were busy digging a pit and preparing a pig - slow cooked over time - the way it was done in the old country. Luckily Carlos and I had to get back to Mobile before the party because they ended up poisoning just about everyone in the family.
My step-father was called The Old Man as both an epithet and term or endearment, a comment on his age and on his status as the head of the house. My mother was a seamstress who worked at home. For pretty much all of our lives, he was our contact with the real world.
He worked as a letter carrier and had some sort of posh route on Madison Avenue in New York. He probably got the nice route by virtue of his responsible nature. You could hear him rattling pots and pans at 4 am as he set out from Jersey City to make the trek to New York. Even in a blizzard he'd still get there. I bet he never missed more than four days in the many many years he worked for them and this only because of some sort of city shutdown.
He had a habit of bringing things home that he might run into while at work. Interesting things, like horse meat. Just to try it. He loved gadgets and electronics (I remember one year he bought home a thing to make your television a color television which was actually a piece of acetate that you pasted on the front of the tv.) and especially his cars, which you could find him shining on any Saturday morning.
One holiday - I'm not sure if it was to cuts costs or if someone gave it to him - he brought home a live duck or a goose. Whatever it was, it was a huge animal. The plan was that they would have a fresh-killed dinner like the ones in PR. I must have been about 4 or 5, making Papo 3 or 2, Eddie one year less, etc.
At any rate we were really little kids, living with our parents in this small New York City apartment and so we set out to watch the spectacle of the old man killing this thing he had just brought home.
He put it into the bathtub. And maybe it was because it was so huge you can't kill it like you kill a chicken, by wringing its neck, or maybe he just doesn't remember his campesino days. But, for whatever reason he takes an ax and whacks its head off.
All hell breaks loose. This thing starts jerking, squalling and shrieking so hard it surprises him and, in a panic, he let's go. It comes up out of the bathtub like some sort of Phoenix. My brother and I run away in terror, covering our heads as this thing flies around the apartment spewing blood, shit, and innards over everything, finally collapsing somewhere.
This is one of my favorite and earliest anecdotes. Not because it went so swimmingly, because, obviously, it didn't. But because it's another vibrant memory of the many characters with whom I share a past. Along the way we all screw up, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not. But in the end, we're family and it's these memories, the good, the bad and the "MEH", that makes my family so special to me.
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