by Philip Gambone

Even with creeping secularization, Christmas is still a big deal in Mexico—a season imbued with the message and spirit of the ancient nativity story. Yuletide tourists to San Miguel may only see the giant Christmas tree in front of the Parroquia and the tin stars festooning the streets, but there's a lot more to the holiday here. The posadas, midnight Masses, manger scenes, the Día de los Reyes, Candelaria, concerts, singing, and food, food, food … My Italian grandmothers would have felt right at home here.

The Christmas season is also a time for giving gifts. Here's one I'd recommend: A Very Mexican Christmas published by New Vessel Press. They're an independent publishing house in New York that specializes in fiction and narrative nonfiction in translation. Frustrated by the paucity of translations into English, the founders started the press in 2013 to correct this deficiency. They believe that "knowledge of a multitude of cultures and literatures enriches our lives by offering passageways to understand and embrace the world." Books that the press has published have won the National Book Award and the National Translation Prize.

Fabio Morábito
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Among the press's projects is a series of books under the general title "A Very Christmas," each one highlighting Christmas stories, essays, and poems from a different world culture. The installments include volumes on Christmas in France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, India, and Ireland. In 2022, they published A Very Mexican Christmas, their eighth volume in the series.

Don't be fooled by the cheerful, child-friendly cover: this is an anthology for adults, though I imagine that middle and high school students would enjoy it, too. Whoever chose the thirteen selections did a fine job. Each of the pieces, mostly from twentieth-century authors, is a small gem.

In "The Toppled Tree" by Fabio Morábito (translated by Andrea G. Labinger), Antonio pays a Christmastime visit to the widowed mother of his childhood friend Alfonso. Twenty years have passed since he and Alonso were friends, but he feels he must make amends for all the mishaps he brought into this family when he was a kid, including the time he knocked down their Christmas tree. Since then, Antonio's life has been a wavering one—"always in flight but never truly adventurous." Claiming that she does not remember the incident of the toppled tree, the mother invites him to help her decorate her new Christmas tree. In the closing paragraphs of the story, Morábito avoids all the pitfalls of sentimentality while giving us a surprising and psychologically complex denouement.

Manuel Altamirano
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Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, a 19th-century Indigenous (Chontal) writer, journalist and politician, is represented with an excerpt from Christmas in the Mountains (translated by Jennifer Shyue). Riding his horse in an "ocean of solitary, savage mountains," the weary narrator, a Republican reformist and nonbeliever, recalls the excitement of childhood Christmases—the happy bustle of merrymakers in the streets, vendors selling candy, "a world of toys and lovely jams"—a holiday that gave him vertigo. He meets a priest, one of the many detested clergymen he has warred against, who offers him aid and comfort. This simple encounter between enemies leads to a kind of spiritual conversion for the cynical revolutionary.

Christmas memories also figure in Amado Nervo's "The Old Man." It's a charming tale about a story that the narrator's wet nurse, Donaciana, used to tell him every December about the withering away of a frail old man and, at midnight on the 31st, the birth of his red-cheeked and very handsome son. Nervo is also represented by his lovely poem "Christmas Night."

Laura Esquivel
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Two of Mexico's most popular female writers, Laura Esquivel and Sandra Cisneros, are included. An excerpt from Esquivel's novel Like Water for Chocolate (translated by Carol and Thomas Christensen) highlights all the author's delicious characteristics: strong female characters, passionate love, family drama, and food, including Christmas rolls. The excerpt contains my favorite sentence in the entire book: "Your ma talks about being ready for marriage like she was dishing up a plate of enchiladas!"

Sandra Cisneros
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"Three Wise Guys" by Cisneros (this one originally in English) is about a mysterious present that arrives at the Gonzalez family from the three Travis brothers, one of whom is the principal of the children's school. "DO NOT OPEN TILL XMAS" the gift card says. But Mama Gonzalez insists that the children keep the Mexican tradition of not opening the box—one that is bigger than usual—until January 6. What could be inside? A refrigerator? A color television? When they finally open the box, the gift at first flabbergasts and disappoints them, but it gradually wins over at least one member of the family.

Carlos Monsivais
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Carlos Monsiváis, one of Mexico's preeminent cultural critics, is represented by "The Two Christmases" (translated by Jennifer Shyue), a short essay on the commercialization and Americanization of the holiday. "For me, there are at least two Christmases," he writes. "The first is the one of Christian affirmations, family, and mutual good will; the second is the apotheosis of consumption, the triumph of obligatory mall visits that have become elements of communal life."

A Very Mexican Christmas also includes pieces by Carlos Fuentes, Carmen Boullosa, Amparo Dávila, Luis Gonzaga Urbina, and a lovely baroque Christmas poem, "The Birth of Christ with Comment on the Bee," by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexico's "Tenth Muse."

Sor Juana
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Even if you don't celebrate Christmas, this little anthology provides plenty of delicious Mexican flavor. ¡Felices fiestas!

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just been published by Rattling Good Yarn Press and is available on Amazon and at the Aurora and Biblioteca bookshops.

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