The scent of Navidad - Lui

Traditionally in the United States the scent of Christmas is gingerbread, pine, candy canes, sugar cookies, and maybe chocolate. I never thought about the scent of Christmas in Mexico until one day while visiting an office for work.  At this office they had Christmas decorations and the most distinctive Christmas scent I have experienced since moving to USA.

Growing up in Mexico Christmas is a very drawn out ordeal, being a very catholic county we drag out the entire event and make it about the Super Star of the show Baby Jesus and his birth. We do the traditional Novena, prior to his birth, or what we traditionally call Posadas.

Las Posadas that we used to go to growing up were held at Doña Gaby’s house. About a block away, past the factory, the bike shop and the mysterious store that closed down. My mom knew Doña Gaby from selling her seeds for her birds and chickens. Doña Gaby lived in a small house, with her single daughter Trinidad, who we all knew only as Trini. Their Posadas were mostly people from the neighborhood, her daughter and her kids, her son and his kids, the people who lived next to her, the lady who owned the store by the bridge, and a few others who lived close by. All together we rocked the posadas for the 10 years that I remember.

Every kid’s favorite part of Las Posadas is always the Aguinaldos… the treats given at the end of the Posada. There were 9 days of posadas and 1 guest who was in charge of the Aguinaldos each year.  My mom would have a day each year and we would always be recruited to help.

An Aguinaldo is a bag of yummy goodness, packed with the traditional treats for Christmas. The basic staples for Anguinaldos are peanuts, animal crackers, an orange and a tangerine… all of this packed in a bag are the scent of Christmas for me.

I had never realized how much I would miss Las Posadas, or the scent of peanuts, animal cracker, oranges and tangerine in a bag and how much they all together would bring me the scent of Christmas. When I walked into that office was when it all came rushing back, one of their staff was eating a tangerine in her desk and it could be smelled throughout the small office, it only took me 15 Christmases in USA to figure out that I missed something so small about my Navidad in Mexico.

If it wasn’t for that person in the office eating her tangerine, I would have never connected the scent of tangerine to my Christmas. I would have kept thinking of pozole or tamales…. So Thank you random person in Newport PA, thank you for eating a tangerine at your desk and brining back the wonderful memories of my Christmas in Mexico.

Las lecturas - Lui

Las lecturas
Growing up I always liked reading... Didn't realize how much I had read until the last few years thinking about how I read my son books now.
My mom has always been very well read, she wanted to go to
School to be a teacher, but for reasons beyond her she wasn't able to. She always had books in the house and my grandfather was the only person that I remember reading the newspaper in my family.
Mom used to take us to the magazine shop and let us each pick our own magazine or comic book, she would get one too. I used to get Archie, and I remember my mom used to get either a cowboy adult comic novel or a mystery adult comic novel. For reasons beyond my imagination my mom used to let me read her adult novels... Which could have very graphic pictures and descriptions of very adult subjects. I didnt realize then what those were, only cares about reading.
Mom also used to get Good Housekeeping in Spanish and I used to read the articles in it. Once there was an article about different ways to style hair for the beach, and one of them was Sexy... I didn't know what that was so I asked my mom, she didnt want to tell me and demanded to know where I had seen that word; imagine that, she would let me read the adult mystery comic novels with sex scenes drawn in them, but freaked out when I asked what sexy meant!!! My mom is too funny!
I also read my older sister's science book and did half of the experiments in the book, the ones that the ingredients were available to me.
Also read stories of the Bible, which explained to more about God and life than my catecismo teacher had.
When my dad brought us books from USA to start practicing English I read those too... But found the pictures so violent that I had to put them away for a while.
I don't know how many books I have read in my life, but I know there is so much more to be discovered in the wonderful world of them.

The places we could go to by Lui

Hermanitas and I spent a wonderful 20 hours in NYC, where we travel to every year for a concert; Enrique Bunbury every year. We have gotten incredibly lucky that he has come there 3 years in a row, and hope for 4; we'll just have to see.

Almost every time we go we ask the same thing, if we would have stayed in yuriria, would we be doing this trip... And where would we go?

Most of us left there being too young to travel to the next town over without proper permission and adult supervision. As we were getting our documentation ready to travel to USA we had a number of trips under our belt, Leon twice, and Ciudad Juarez. Both with mom and dad, both with limited sight seeing or souvenir
hunting.

Mom did an absolutely wonderful job at taking us places, and letting us go in school field trips to see more places. We all had been to Morelia and Leon, where I had visited the zoo and planetarium.... Where I wanted to move to...

Thinking of our young age and where we had been I can say with certainty that we would travel to Leon to see Bunbury, that we could travel to Morelia to spend the day, that we would even venture as far as Acapulco to go
To the beach, and could even travel to mexico city just for fun.

Sisters and I have had our opportunity at wonderful trips, Philadelphia, Washington, New York city, Las Vegas... The more adventurous have been all over Europe, Spain, Paris, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Czech Republic.

No matter what country we are in, we have the adventure gene given to us by our parents an grandparents, and would continue to embrace it and find things in the world... Next in the agenda for sisters and I ... Nina wants to see the 7 wonders of the world, Bety wants to go to Japan, I'm on my way to Miami Florida and want to take my son to Australia.