Reforma, Dec. 23, 2022
Juan Villoro*
Sometimes the customs of a famous country are celebrated in another that is nothing like it and has little chance of carrying them out.
I am referring, of course, to Christmas, a pagan rite that centuries later became associated with Christianity and later with the taste of the New England colonists for giving thanks by eating turkeys (although Thanksgiving occurs in November, its gastronomic impact extends to Christmas Eve). In Mexico, all this is exotic, which increases the enthusiasm to participate in the confusion.
In my childhood, greater emphasis was placed on Three Kings Day [January 6, Epiphany, the last of the twelve days of the Christmas Season] than on Christmas Eve. But the proximity to the United States brought the delivery of gifts forward to December 24. Like so many sports heroes who are replaced by an upstart, the Child God was replaced by Santa Claus.
All culture is made of mixtures. The curious thing is not that we have assumed other people's habits, but rather that we do so with passionate fervor as if the destiny of the country were pulled by sleighs. There's no way the evidence can mitigate our winter passion.
In December, it is hot in most of the country and at noon a sun of justice falls. In this climate, children in schools draw snowy landscapes, and cars are adorned with fake reindeer antlers. On television, advertisers report that Mexicans in tune with the season are blond, wear scarves, ice skate, and give away the most expensive whiskey. After the commercials are over, The Grinch is broadcast for the umpteenth time.
What does that have to do with us? Christmas trees do not abound in the Mexican landscape; if you discover more than ten, that qualifies as a National Park. However, to satisfy our Nordic longings, nurseries have sprung up that offer 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 Three Kings Day and stored away until the following Christmas.
The fact that Santa Claus comes from the North Pole tests the children's belief system. How does he manage to beat the city traffic, park his sleigh and get into houses where there is no chimney?
Also, the Christmas diet contravenes customs. Perhaps influenced by the peaceful atmosphere, we eat less chili than ever, we prepare cod without much of an idea of how to remove the bones, and for hours we inject a turkey that no one knows how to slice with wine and spices. Why don't we appeal to our ancient culinary wisdom?
My opinion is that we don't want to deprive ourselves of the sense of extravagance that Christmas brings. Is there anything rarer than being happy in the company of relatives that we have avoided all year? This magnificent feeling of unreality is reinforced if we eat strange things.
For years, my father was in charge of cutting the turkey because he had studied medicine for two years, and that allowed him to distinguish 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 care of the task...
Why is there nothing Mexican on the menu? To demonstrate that we have not lost our identity, we include two dishes that we do not eat again all year: romeritos and huauzontles. These are vegetables submerged in thick mole sauce, difficult to chew, and worse, 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 do not forget our vernacular essences.
MV Note: Romeritos with mole or romeritos, is a typical Mexican dish whose main ingredient is the leaves of the romerito (Suaeda spp.), a wild plant that shows up in cornfields. The romerito is bathed in a mole (a thick sauce made of many ground spices, chilies and various other ingredients), usually mole poblano (includes chocolate, bannana, raisins, almonds and many spices), with shrimp powder added. It is traditional for Mexican Christmas... With the intense flavor of the mole and the aroma of romeritos, this dish has a strong indigenous component. (Wikipedia en español)
Huauzontle is the indigenous Nahuatl name for Chenopodium berlandieri, a species of the genus Chenopodium, native to North America similar to Chenopodium quinoa, i.e., quinoa. (Wikipedia en español)
This gastronomic disorder is followed by sugar-coated almonds and Alicante nougat [a hard nougat made from a base of toasted almonds, honey, sugar, and egg white], which explains why, on Christmas Night, there are so many dentists on call.
Will the future bring new features to the party? Yes, provided they are foreign to us. Mexico, as the poet Ramón López Velarde loved, is "faithful to its daily image" throughout the year, but takes vacations from itself on Christmas Eve. The reason seems to be the following: we are convinced that happiness comes from afar. Surrounded by bad news, we long for a distant glow to light up the sky.
Like the couple of outsiders who found kindness for strangers in Nazareth, at Christmas we do everything possible to feel like strangers in our own home, and thus, we discover a surprising way of being ourselves.
*Juan Villoro won the Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo [The Witness], the Vázquez Montalbán International Journalism Prize for his book on soccer, Dios es redondo [God Is Round], and the Ibero-American José Donoso Prize for his body of work. He has taught at UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico], Yale, Princeton and the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Among his children's books, Professor Zíper and La fabulosa guitarra eléctrica [The Fabulous Electric Guitar] stand out.