Last week I saw the movies "This Christmas" and "Nothing Like the Holidays." Both movies are funny but forgettable holiday flicks aimed at African-American and Latino audiences, respectively. Neither is supposed to make you weep, but weep I did, especially after "Holidays," which is about a Puerto Rican family that lives in Chicago's Boricua neighborhood, Humboldt Park.
Seeing the Rodriguez clan talk over each other while the non-Latina wife asks why the family is "fighting" rang true for me. We were all pretty loud growing up. Not "call the cops, the crazy Hispanic family is fighting again" loud, but definitely "outside voices" loud. We can talk about everything -- religion, pop culture, politics, education, money, kids -- and we can spend hours at a dinner table (well, if there weren't young children to mind). But Christmas will never be the same again, now that our matriarch is gone.
I know her spirit lives on in all of us and all the other platitudes, but the flesh-and-blood Mami bringing us all together, mediating our little squabbles, reminding us of our Colombian heritage, making arroz con coco, and buying our children annoying electronic toys is not here anymore, and it sucks. And the hurt is unavoidable and inescapable. Everywhere I look there are grandparents buying presents for their grandchildren, mothers and daughters walking arm-in-arm at the mall, grandmas strolling their grandbabies, onesies that say "Grandma is Better than Santa." I just want it all to stop -- not the holiday necessarily, because I can't wait to see my siblings and nieces and nephews -- but all the reminders of what we've lost now that Mami has passed.
My in-laws, who are both older than my mother, came over last weekend to drop off a truckload opresents for three kids. They're spending Christmas with their other daughter-in-law's family in one of those below-freezing states. I'm sure they're hurt they weren't invited to spend Christmas with my side of the family, but I'm also sure they aren't sensitive enough to understand why. This is not a Christmas any of us in my family wants to spend watching healthy elderly grandparents dote on their grandchildren. Certainly not I, and they're my kids' grandparents. Not my sister or her husband, whose father died the day after Thanksgiving and whose children, at 11 and 13, no longer have living grandparents. Not my brother and sister-in-law, whose own mother was recently touch-and-go in the hospital for serious heart and respiratory failures (they're coming the 26th, in fact, so she can be with her recuperating mother, who's still in fragile health).
This is a Christmas the four of us and our families need to spend together. Diana is going to cook the arroz con coco, and a few of us have in Mami's honor, gotten the children loudy and parent-aggravating gifts (thanks a bunch sis!). We'll be, I imagine, in a cocoon of grief and joy: grief because we will never spend another Christmas with Mami, but joy because we can remember all the wonderful years we did.
Photo: Christmas 1999 at Diana's home in Central Florida