Las Christmas (8 page)

Holiday Punch

No kid grows up in the United States without being subjected to some sort of fruit punch, with or without the help of the local Lions' Club. The punch bowl can be filled with any combination of juice and soda. In Mexico, the
Ponche de Navidad
often includes indigenous fruits, like guava and
tejocote,
scented with a dash of cinnamon; and for the adults a little tequila, rum, or
vino tinto.
This recipe (typical of the punch served by Lions' Clubs across the country) comes to us courtesy of Marion Cooper of Simi Valley, California. It's easy to make, delicious, and perfect for Christmas parties.

Mix all ingredients and pour over ice.

Makes
20
servings

Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez is originally from the Dominican Republic, but she immigrated to
this country with her parents at the age of ten. She is the author of three novels,
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies,
and
¡Yo!,
two books of poems,
Homecoming
and
The Other Side
,
and a
forthcoming collection of essays,
Something to Declare.
She teaches at
Middlebury College. This story is a fictionalized account of her own experiences
growing up in the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic.

SWITCHING TO SANTICLÓ

“HE'S GOING TO COME through the roof?” I asked. I didn't like the sound of it.

My cousin Fico, who was usually my informer in the ways of the world, was telling me how Santicló would deliver his gifts in a few days. Ever since the Americans had occupied the country and put our dictator in place, customs from up north had replaced the old ways. Now we would be getting presents from big, fat, blue-eyed Santicló. That is, if either of us were getting any gifts. As the two hellions in the family, we had already been told that Santicló would probably just bring us cat poopoo in a shoe box.

I liked it much more when
niño
Jesus brought us presents. Even if we only got one present apiece, it was guaranteed. He reserved hell for people who didn't behave, but He didn't spoil Christmas by bringing up punishments.

That was not His way.

He also didn't come down through the roof in the middle of the night and scare you half to death. Christmas morning beside the crèche under the sea-grape tree painted white and blooming out of a paint can covered in tinfoil, you found your bicycle with the long plastic ribbons coming out of the handles, or hanging from one of the sea-grape branches was your cowgirl outfit. If only it had been a cowboy outfit with a holster like Fico's instead of a sissy pocketbook with a vanity mirror! But to say so was to be ungrateful to
el niño
Jesus, which wasn't a nice thing to do to a baby who was going to grow up and be crucified. In this way, Santicló might be better. He might listen to complaints. He might take returns.

“He might be here late, though, because he's got to come down from Nueva York,” Fico went on, a grin spreading on his face.

That did sound promising. Nueva York was where toys came from. Whenever our grandparents went north, they came back with suitcases full of games and puzzles and paddle balls and plastic sheets you could draw on, lift the sheets, and—abracadabra—the drawing was gone! And, of course, practical things like school shoes and book bags and Russell Stover chocolates that you studied carefully when the box went by to be sure you picked one that didn't have something yucky inside. Ever so gently you pressed with the ball of your finger to see if it was a taker—one with nuts or with more chocolate in the center. Quickly, you popped it into your mouth, and then, if you were Fico or me, you opened your mouth in midchew to show off your prize to the prim girl cousins. “Mami,” they wailed in chorus, “they're being bad again.”

“I'm asking for a trampoline and a little airplane that flies and a
carrito
I can drive myself!” Fico was yelling as if he wanted Santicló to hear him all the way up in the United States. Each new present was pronounced at a higher decibel than the one before it.

I was sick with envy. My cousin always had so many toys. His parents were rich and traveled to Miami and Nueva York and took him along. But Mami had married Papi who didn't have that kind of money. In fact, Papi's family lived in the interior in houses with crooked floors and furniture like the rockers in the maid's room at my maternal grandparents' house. Papi's brothers were always in trouble with the dictator. One uncle, Tío Federico, was a lawyer who had to stay in the house all the time because he had done something he shouldn't have done. Another, Tío Puchulo, had written something in the papers that made all the aunts walk around with their hands at their hearts and their eyes as big as the eyes of people in movies when they got a fright.

I decided to holler out my list as well. Maybe Santicló would listen and bring me everything I asked for. “I want a trampoline and a flying airplane and a television.”

“I'm asking for a television, too,” Fico piped up.

“I asked first!”

“You did not!”

We were almost touching chins, yelling at each other. I could feel my cousin's moist breath on my face. Soon we would be rolling around on the ground, punching each other, until one of the maids came out and separated us and took us to our mothers, who would remind us that Santicló was coming next week and all he was going to bring us was two boxes of cat poopoo.

That thought made me stop midholler. “Fico,” I relented, “maybe we'd better stop. Maybe Santicló can hear us.”

Fico shrugged. “Santicló speaks English, stupid. He doesn't understand us.” But he stopped yelling, too, just in case Santicló was like Tío Puchulo, who always said that just because he didn't know any English didn't mean he didn't understand it.

SPEAKING OF Tío Puchulo, where was he? Just a few days ago, he was the name on everyone's lips on account of something he wrote in the papers. Then, like those sheets from the United States you drew on and lifted, abracadabra, he disappeared. “Where's Tío Puchulo?” I asked a few days before Christmas when he didn't appear for Sunday dinner. The whole patio of aunts and uncles and my grandparents went silent. My mother gave me that look the girl cousins gave me when I showed them my Russell Stover prize midchew.

“Why do you ask where your tío Puchulo is?” she asked me too lightly to sound like my mother talking.

This was the stupidest question I'd ever heard. “Because he's not here.”

“Oh,” everyone sighed and laughed with apparent relief. “Of course he's not here. Your
tío
left the capital.”

“We don't know where he is,” my mother added quickly. One of the maids had just come out to the patio with the rolling cart of platters.

“Let's talk about Santicló, shall we?” one of the aunts asked cheerfully. There was a raucous YES! from the kids' table. “What does everyone want for Christmas?” Soon we were hollering our lists so loud, my aunt put a finger in each ear and rolled her eyes like a crazy person.

When dinner was over, my mother pulled me aside. “Cuca,” she said, her lovey-dovey name for me when she wanted something. “Do you want Santicló to bring you that TV?”

“Santicló's going to bring me a TV?!!!” I cried out.

“Well,” Mami hesitated. “Maybe he'll bring one for the whole family.”

“Oh.” That dampened my happiness. In Fico's house, they had one TV for his parents, one for the kids, and one for the maids. And now he was even asking for one to have in his very own room. But even a shared TV was better than none at all.

“But darling Cuca, Mami thinks you'd better not mention your
tío
Puchulo's name. You see, Santicló doesn't like him. If Santicló hears you mentioning his name, I'm afraid that TV won't make it down here on his sled.”

As far as I was concerned, Santicló had very poor taste if he didn't like my uncle. Tío Puchulo was fun. Sundays, when he came over, he'd ask the boy cousins if they wanted to see the angels' panties, and if they said yes, he lifted them by their ankles, so they could look upside down at the sky. And if you got a bad chocolate, girl or boy, Tío Puchulo always called you over and pulled a chiclet out of his pocket. But a TV was a TV. I gave my word I wouldn't mention my uncle's name.

“There's a good girl,” my mother said. It was the first time in ages she'd said that about me.

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, my grandparents threw a big party. All the grandchildren came for a little while, but before the uncles started tangoing on the dining room table or throwing themselves into the pool, we were marched home. Tonight nobody complained. We knew Santicló would not come until all the children in the world had fallen asleep.

From my bedroom, I could hear the party going in the distance. Iluminada, the old nursemaid, helped us into our babydolls, and then we knelt down in a row to say our prayers. As I was going through my long list of whom I wanted God to take care of—my grandparents, my mother, my father, my aunts, my uncles—Tío Puchulo's name popped out.

I clapped my hand over my mouth. I looked up at Lumi. Maybe she hadn't heard me?

“Why not pray for your
tío
Puchulo?” she said in a fierce, low voice. “May God help him,” she added, making the sign of the cross.

“But Santicló doesn't like him,” I explained.

“Santicló!” she snapped. “Your parents are bringing you up
sin principios.
” Scolds were usually delivered en masse, even if there had only been one offender. “All of you praying to a big fat white man in a red suit like the devil! You ask
niño
Jesus for forgiveness, and maybe He'll come back again to this house and lift the heaviness that is here.”

I never listened much to what the grown-ups had to say unless there was a TV involved or a visit to the ice cream shop or a squirt gun or a paddleball. But Lumi always made sense to me. She could read my coffee cup and tell me I was going to go away soon to another country where I would switch languages, homes, schools, friends, hopes, and dreams. She had been in my father's family since the Haitian massacre way back before I was even born. My father's mother, whom I had never met, had hidden the terrified Haitian woman and her little boy under a pile of laundry. When the dictator's men searched the house, they found no one. Lumi was devoted to my father's family, but especially to my
tío
Puchulo who had told the soldier ready to poke the laundry with his drawn bayonet, that if he ruined my grandmother's sheets, he was going to have the devil to pay for them.

I fell asleep with a heavy heart. No presents for me, I was sure of it . . .

In the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of footsteps. Someone was moving above my bedroom. Footsteps on the stairs . . . voices . . . hushings. . . . A little later, a car started up. Did Santicló's sled break down? Did he know how to drive a car?

Years later, on safe ground, having escaped to the United States of America, having switched citizenship and languages and homes and dreams—like Lumi said I would—Papi told me the story of how Tío Puchulo had been hidden in an upstairs closet of our house for two weeks before they had found a way to smuggle him out of the country through the interior and across the Haitian border.

Christmas morning, Mami's face was happier, as if some weight had been lifted from her shoulders. And there it was in the
sala
of our house, a TV. But it turned out, in the weeks to come, that there was nothing to watch. Recently, with trouble from rebels and such, programming had been limited to long reports from the national palace. “Be careful what you ask for!” Lumi scolded when I complained.

But what I remember about that first Christmas we switched to Santicló is not the new TV or the subsequent disappointment of having nothing to watch, but how I woke up in the middle of Christmas night to the sound of footsteps above my head, and my heart filled with happiness. Santicló had come, after all! Mami had been wrong. He did like my uncle.

I was oh-so-tempted to go see the presents piled high by the sea-grape tree in the living room. But I couldn't seem to pull myself out of bed. My body felt heavier and heavier as slowly, sheet after sheet after sheet of darkness descended on me, and I fell asleep.