I am celebrating the new year in a different land
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- January 1, 2018
- 1471
Have you ever spent New Year’s in another country? It happens the same as it does here, the last minutes breathlessly counted down. It creeps in under the same sky, a different latitude and longitude enveloping you closely as you anxiously wonder what you could’ve done better in the fading year.
Could I have been kinder? More ardent? Less adamant? A fresh set of 365 days seems like a crisply wrapped gift, ready to wildly dig in. I hesitate right around 11:55 p.m., no matter where I am, and I think back on the days trailing behind me. I hover over them, just for a bit, knowing there is nothing I can change.
I’ve spent several New Year’s in Mexico, and I reflect on them today. The atmosphere in the colonia is festive, firecrackers echoing in a smoky haze that laces through the still air. It’s cold in Maquixco on this day, and I watch my then small children running around in the streets with the neighboring kids and pull my jacket firmly around my shoulders.
Posole, a traditional spicy hominy soup, is warm in my belly. My son is obsessed with the firecrackers that can be bought on any street corner, and his uncle verses him on safely setting them off from the flat roof of our abode.
I go back a bit further and remember when I lived in Mexico with my husband’s family. Those eight months I was there encompassed a last bit of summer, Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), Christmas and New Year’s.
We had a small fire burning inside the kitchen, some embers to keep the room warm, and a large Rosca de Reyes bread was centered on the table. This is a round pastry that is dotted with nuts and fruits, and a tiny plastic baby is baked inside. Whoever finds this baby is to hold a dinner party for all present. This is usually eaten on Jan. 6, which in Mexico is Dia de los Reyes (All King’s Day). I guess we were eating it early that year, and in my piece of bread was nestled a small plastic baby.
Experiencing holiday traditions in other cultures is a marked blow to anything we may hold dear and close because it brings into focus the idea that ours isn’t the only way of things. I’ve sat in darkened streets beside loved ones, ringing in the new year in a much different way than I ever did in the states. Flavors burst on my tongue, awakening senses I didn’t know I had. The sky was the same yet different, and the lilting sounds of the Spanish language rang in my ear merrily. I learned to speak Spanish fluently in the time I lived there, and as I’ve said before, travel is very fatal to prejudice.
I met hospitality in its finest form in Mexico, and around the holidays it kicks into overdrive. With little there is much, and in showing others how we celebrate, we absorb that difference into our systems. We see love, given in different forms, readying itself for the newest of years, and we see it is good.
I love New Year’s in my own little home as well with champagne corks and appetizers, friends gathered, and lots of laughter. Being in different places allows us to appreciate the home fires as well as feeling the longing for the far away ones we’ve stoked that are ever burning.