Dear Caminoheads,

Last year, Ron, our BC from Virginia relocated to Spain, precisely to Castrillo de los Polvazares – Astorga, asked me about the traditions around Christmas in Argentina. Lovely enough, Anne and Ron became good friends with a family there, who were Argentinian, and they wanted to know more about our culture as they were going to spend Christmas with them.

I emailed Ron with my memories about the Christmas when I was a child/teenager, and all these memories had the beach where my uncle and aunt had businesses and we used to spend all the summer. This past week that I travelled to visit my aunt, I went to that place but to the “main city” not to the beach. I had not been there for several years now, and the elders from my family have all passed away, and the younger of us have taken decisions over the holidays and those Christmas in the beach are now memories of a past time, but fondly ones.

I thought then to share some of those paragraphs I wrote to Ron with you all here…

“So, now to our topic, Christmas here… Christmas here has a lot of Christmas in Italy and Spain. There is where our grandparents  or grand-grandparents came from and they kept their traditions even when the weather was not suitable for them. 

When my brother and I went to live with my grandparents and then aunt and uncle (my brother was 8 and I was 5 when our mother died), we started spending Christmas and the New Year in a beach almost 600 km away from here to the south. My uncle and aunt had businesses there (a carrousel, an enterteinment park, and later in their lives, an ice cream shop). So the holidays were spent there.

My grandfather was in charge of buying lots of “sweets” here in Buenos Aires, and go in the bus with cardboard boxes tied with a plastic thread, full of them.

On Christmas afternoon, around 7, it was time to set the table. That was my job always: I would do all different things with the napkins, use the glasses from my grandparents wedding set, their plates, etc. They had given the part my mother used to have to my aunt to have in the house in the beach. So the table was all special and old fashioned (to my eyes!) And the table was always in the “quincho” or outside, under the tree.

By 8 PM, my grandfather used to come and put the TV with the mass in the Vatican. It was always a must. (Fast forward, when I went to Europe for the first time in 2010 with E. -my ex-husband-, our first place was Rome. When I sat in St. Peters basilica for mass, I couldn’t hold my tears thinking and remembering my grandfather -who was my best friend- sitting in the “quincho” as I set the table, listening to “la misa criolla” and the liturgy. )”