Christmas 2013
Sometimes, when the holidays roll around (so unbelievably quickly), there may be a tendency to want to skip it all... let the neighbors decorate... do we really need to give a gift to someone to show that we love them?... the little kids I know don't need any toys... what do we do this all for?
A long, long time ago,, during a life I barely recognize as my own, I used to love to give an annual Christmas party and invite family and friends. These parties were mainly at the house, and sometimes took on different themes. One year, a party was conceived during a Friday night dinner at a Mexican restaurant. The ambiance was warm and cheerful, the strung lights and mariachi music working together under the pepper trees in an outdoor dining area. The food was good, and the best part was the fresh tortillas being made in the courtyard. Margaritas helped enhance it all, we hired the tortilla-making lady and the mariachi band, and a Mexican-theme Christmas party was born.
Decorating took a couple of weeks in the evening and on weekends as we planned the touches to hide the warts, like the multi-colored paper scraps thrown around a bare, motley concrete floor in the garage, which is where we s et up the tortilla stove and tables for dining. There was usually pretty good attendance at the annual Christmas party, and a good number of family and friends came to that one. Luminaries lining the entrance steps were replaced that year with devotion candles (the kind you can buy in the grocery store here that burn for 7 days and may have a picture of the "Bleeding Heart" or the Virgen de Guadalupe on them - I went for he plain white version). there was the usual sest up of chafing trays of food, the house and Christmas trees decorated, with drinks at the bar, and the party was flowing on schedule.
The mariachi band showed up (they had great outfits - they were pretty!) and let us know that at parties, they would usually roam around like at the restaurant and didn't expect us to gather our guests to watch them perform, like we would for the caroling group we often hired. the band started playing in the living room off of the kitchen, tempering the volume for the venue, in front of a large brick fireplace hearth. about a song-and-a-half into the set, we lost all the power to the house and everything went dark except the Bunsen burners and devotion candles; the mariachi band never missed a beat and continued to play in the dark. Outside were 20 candles or so (it's been a long time - i can't be sure), so some of the quick-thinking guys went outside and gathered them up, placing them around the room and behind where the band was playing; we took a couple of candles and looked for anyone in the now-dark rooms, and the stragglers naturally came toward the light. That mariachi band had a captive audience as the room filled all the way up, people sitting on the floor and furniture; it was a pretty large room and there were people in every inch of it. (If the fire department saw, they would have shut us down!) During the last song of their set, the power came back up, as if on cue. We were accused of planning the whole thing, and I might have thought someone did cut only the power to our house if the whole neighborhood wasn't dark as well; what a good idea that would have been - it drew everyone together to share a special moment.
While the power was out and the band was playing, I stood in the kitchen, looking through the pass-through at my family and friends, bathed in a warm glow from the many candles and all watching a band play mariachi music with smiles on their faces - it occurred to me that just about everything I loved was in that room right then, willing or not, and I knew it was a moment that would always be special to me. I let that memory slip away for years, but am so grateful that it found me again.
Here's to Christmas and the New Year, never something we should wish away because it didn't seem to be gone long enough. Wishing you holiday memories that will last a lifetime.