Christmas

I come into the world, to show the world that I will fulfill all that I have caused to be spoken by my prophets. (3 Ne. 1:13)

Of course, the Christmas story shows us that the fulfillment of the promises doesn't necessarily look like you think it's going to.

I'm not sure what the mood of that last sentence is. A little bitchy, I guess. But there's a hopefulness in the bitchiness, I suppose.

Over the past few nights, Hugo and I attended the tail end of a series of nine posadas that Latino families staged in different apartments here in Abbey Court. It was nice to see residents organizing themselves in that way, preserving traditions. Watching the children sit more or less patiently through the rosary so they could get their aguinaldos afterward (little bags with candies and peanuts and cookies and usually a tangerine—as Hugo remarked, it's like Halloween nine nights in a row), or watching the older ones play video games on whatever these new-fangled little handheld devices are called, I wondered how invested the Americanizing generation will be in this tradition when they have kids of their own. Will they want to organize posadas for them? I hope so.

For that matter, might we get to a point, multiculturally, where the posadas are integrated into the broadly held American sense of how Christmas is celebrated? Might the posadas become, in other words as conventionally "American" a Christmas tradition as Christmas tree lightings, caroling, or department store Santas? I'd like to see that.

If we're still here next year, Hugo and I have offered our apartment as the site for a posada. Or perhaps we could revive the celebration of the posada as a community event, as the Church of the Advocate attempted our first two years here. We have the networks now, perhaps, to pull that off as a genuinely joint endeavor between gringos and Latinos.

Anyway. A nostalgic, daydreamy stream-of-consciousness for Christmas.