Feliz Navidad
12 Minutes Read Time

On Christmas we wake up Puerto Rican. That’s when our grandmother stops pretending that hers is our only blood and lets our grandfather’s bleed back in. She stands at the feet of our beds and pulls on our blanketed toes. “Wake up, you two,” she says, holding up an album cover. “Merry Christmas.”
All year long she hides the José Feliciano album from us, but like magic, it appears on Christmas morning. While all the other families in our building are listening to Nat King Cole, Donny Hathaway, and the Temptations, we jam to a Puerto Rican guitarist.
Bodies warm from our beds, hair mussed from our pillows, and eyes phlegmy from our good deep sleeps, we follow our grandmother down the hall. As we stumble along in our footed G.I. Joe and She-Ra pajamas, she leads us into the living room and straight to the record player on the end table. She lifts the dust cover, slides the record from its sleeve, sets it on the turntable, and lowers the needle. “Knock yourselves out,” she says, abandoning us for the kitchen.
This is her only present to us. Today she doesn’t mind that we are not just hers but our grandfather’s as well. Today we’re allowed to be not only African American but also Puerto Rican, to be all the parts of ourselves. Today we can play our record as many times as we want, as loud as we like, until our mother comes home, dead tired from her overtime shift. When she gets here, we’ll tear bows and shiny wrapping paper off the Jem, Voltron, Transformers, and Teddy Ruxpin toys we asked for. Then she’ll stagger off to bed and we’ll have to keep quiet. For now, we’re allowed to play our music and make noise.
We want just this one thing for Christmas—to play this record that draws us closer to our grandfather. He left New York for Puerto Rico when his kids were little, before we grandkids ever existed. He’s never been back to Brooklyn to see us. He’s a ghost of a man, flimsier than the tinsel we drape from the artificial branches of our artificial tree, a shining sliver of a thin, thin thread. This record is as close to him as we can get, a tether to pull him near. We can’t compete with an island and we are not Christmas-card cute. We’re rough from playing in the streets, strong and wiry from swinging on monkey bars and climbing the stone animals in the courtyard of our housing projects, nimble from setting off roman candles, jumping jacks, moon whistlers, and skyrockets fast enough that our fingers don’t get scorched. Our knees are skinned from playing skelly and shooting marbles, our elbows and arms scabbed from fighting like we mean it. We’re nothing to write home about, yet our mother writes to her father several times a year, sending letters across the ocean to update him on our progress, mailing him school pictures so he can see us for himself. We never hear back. We’ve long since stopped hoping for visits, for birthday or Christmas cards. A simple phone call on a day like today would do. We’d love to hear his voice.
Instead we hear the cuatro, the güiro, the guitar, the horns, and the cheerful holiday wishes of a blind musician. For years we will believe that every singer wearing sunglasses—Héctor Lavoe, Bobby Womack, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Isaac Hayes—is blind. No one will ever tell us different. We play the record and sing along to a song whose words we do not understand. If he were here, our grandfather could translate. If he were here, our grandfather could love us. Without him we have to make do. We make up the words as we go, singing what we think we hear:
Felice la di da
Police la di da
Fleece na vee dah
Potato I know
blah blah blah blah
We sing louder and louder until our grandmother yells from the kitchen that we are giving her a headache. And still we don’t stop.
We’re as happy as a song can make us. We sing with gusto, with all the joy the horns can blare. Our bodies help us to keep time. We strum our stomachs in tune with the guitar and scratch our forearms to the rhythm of the güiro. We turn empty paper-towel rolls into horns and blow, tooting along with the song. We clasp hands and swing each other round. We’re not afraid of looking foolish. No one’s watching us.
We belt out, “I wanna wish you a merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart!” and dance around the living room to wish our furniture well. We sing and circle the living room with our arms flung wide. We fling love from our hearts to the corner of the room where our tree stands, dripping garland and tinsel and shatterproof balls, multicolored electric lights blinking back at us in response. We let everything present—the stereo sound system, the love seat and sofa, the coffee and end tables—know how much we love it. We love the flattened arms of our couches, the dust in the corners, all the loose straw from our broom, even the gouges on the floor from moving the couch and tables out of the way—yes, we love it all.
We dance ourselves dizzy; we sing until we drop. Only then do we hear someone knocking on our door. Our grandmother hushes us before she lets in Ramona, our next-door neighbor.
“Eggnog!” we cheer when Ramona enters, holding a pitcher of white frothy liquid and a pair of plastic cups. We don’t tell her we already have a tall can of nog in the cupboard—hers is fresh and we’re not stupid. We paw her and clamor as she holds the pitcher high above our heads, defending it with her good hand. “¡Cálmense, niños! Be good,” she says. “This is not eggnog.”
“What is it?” we ask.
“Coquito. It’s much, much better.” “It looks like eggnog,” we say.
“It has no eggs,” she explains.
Our grandmother relieves Ramona of her pitcher and takes it to the kitchen table, where she has just laid out our breakfast. “It’s like a Puerto Rican eggnog,” our grandmother tells us.
That’s all we need to hear. We’ll drink Puerto Rican eggnog and pretend we’re in Puerto Rico, just the way we drink Canada Dry and pretend we’re in Canada. We can’t wait.
We all take our places at the kitchen table. In unison, the two women drop their heavy bodies onto the plastic-covered chairs. Dressed in floral housedresses and felt slippers, they look like sisters. One woman Puerto Rican and the other woman previously married to one, they visit each other often, coming together over all they have in common. Brought together by their circumstances, women who moved to these projects after their divorces and found themselves living across the hall from one another, they are the best of friends.
Ramona pours only two cups of the coquito, leaving us out. We look up from our milk and toast and eggs and complain. “What about us?”
“You can’t have any,” our grandmother says. “It has rum in it.”
“The best rum there is.” Ramona holds her cup beneath our noses. “Smell that?”
We sniff deeply and pull back, choking, feeling as if our nose hairs have been set on fire. “Puerto Rican rum. It puts hair on your chest.” Ramona thumps her chest with the hand that’s missing two fingers and tells us about the Bacardí factory back in San Juan. She says they give tours where you see large metal drums of the different rums. She says that just standing inside the factory is enough to make you light-headed and drunk.
Ramona says, “¡Salud!” and the two women clink cups.
Our grandmother drinks deeply of the coquito, leans back in her chair, and sighs. “Now that hits the spot.”
Ramona pulls a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her housedress, shakes out two, and hands one over to our grandmother. The women go to the stove to light their cigarettes. Our grandmother knows she shouldn’t be smoking; we know it too. We cock our brows as she bends to the burner and lights her cigarette in the flames. At our look, she shrugs and says, “It’s Christmas.” She drags on the cigarette and takes her time exhaling. “You’ve got your present and I’ve got mine.”
At the kitchen table the two women turn their backs on us to keep the smoke away while we finish breakfast. As they trade talk about their children, all at work today earning time and a half, we nudge our grandmother’s cup away from her and edge it over to us. We take turns sipping the sweet, strong, creamy coconut drink while the women aren’t looking. That first sip is the sweetest thing we have ever tasted; that second sip is the strongest—it burns the backs of our throats, searing a path straight down to our stomachs. We sip and hum and buzz with coconut and rum. The rum snakes its ways through our bodies, filling our heads, numbing our tongues to fuzz, relaxing our limbs. We want to lay our ballooning heads down on the table as our bodies fill with a slow, building warmth.
“If we were in Puerto Rico right now, we would all still be asleep,” Ramona says. “The parrandas would have kept us up all night.” She tells us of late-night parties, of bands of friends showing up to sing and play music outside people’s homes during the holiday. She looks over her shoulder, sees us with the coquito, and winks.
“Like Christmas carols?” we ask. Under her gaze we take her cup and drink that too.
“Not really. We let the people in. They’re not strangers. We open our homes, give them food and drink. Then we join them and go to the next house. It’s fun. Right now we would just be waking up out of our beds,” she says, her words carrying us away to the place where she and our grandfather are from, an island we don’t expect to ever see.
“There wouldn’t be any room for us there,” our grandmother says. “He doesn’t live alone.” Back in Puerto Rico our grandfather has another wife and a whole other set of children, a sister and brother our mother doesn’t know, an aunt and uncle we’ve never met.
Ramona asks, “Do you think he’ll call?”
“He’d have to care to do that,” our grandmother says, blowing out a wreath of smoke. She turns and catches us with the coquito. She looks into both cups. Yes, it is true. We drank every drop. She warns, “You’ll both be sorry later.”
We’re halfway to sorry now. The rum is doing us in. By the time our mother gets home we’ll be quiet as mice. Tipsy and languid, we’ll hunker down in the back bedroom to watch Christmas shows. Curled up on our grandmother’s bed, we’ll fall asleep to the TV. We’ll dream of Rudolph and Frosty, of George Bailey and Bedford Falls. But just now, our lungs expand like bellows, our chests and stomachs grow as warm as radiators, and we feel a surge of energy. Now we have lightning in our veins, thunder in our hearts.
Our grandmother shoos us away. “Get out from underfoot,” she tells us. “Go play with your present.”
In the living room we put our record back on. Shy now with our neighbor present, we sit quietly on the couch and merely listen to the music, letting Feliciano sing alone.
“But you hate this song,” we hear Ramona say.
“It’s just the one day,” our grandmother answers. We’re neither old nor sensitive enough to guess this song could cause her pain, so we play our record again. And again. And again.
Ramona says, “They’re going to wear it out.”
Our grandmother jokes, “One can only hope.”
The two women laugh until one starts coughing. Ramona comes to us in the living room and says, “Go and get your abuela’s inhaler.”
We race to the back bedroom, fighting over who will find it the fastest. I win, finding it on the dresser on the other side of the oxygen tank. We run back to the kitchen with the inhaler and watch our grandmother take the puffs that calm her breathing, penance for her cigarette.
“Good job, nena,” Ramona tells me, rubbing a circle on my back. She pulls handfuls of sweets from the pockets of her housedress, showering us with packets of dulce de leche, sesame, and tamarind candies. On her way out she bends to us and kisses our cheeks with lips coco sweet.
We save our candy for later. Too long have we been away from our record. By now our mother has caught the A train heading down to Brooklyn and is on her way home to us. We’ve got a half hour tops before the album goes back into hiding.
Our voices return with our neighbor’s departure. We sing once more, this time even louder. We wonder if our grandfather is sitting at home in his living room on an island with his other family, listening to this record today just like we are. We sing to make him miss us, to remember what he’s left behind. We sing at the top of our lungs, hoping our voices will carry out to sea, hoping he can hear us across the ocean that keeps us all apart.
Read more from Issue 18.1.