Christmas memories

These pre-Christmas days bring us beautiful memories of childhood. The beauty of those memories surpasses all the bitterness of that humble childhood misfortune, which meant living a new Christmas each time without a good dish to bring to the table or to our childish stomachs. I remember the morning tours of Gustavo Artime's winery (the store) on Christmas days: boxes full of apples, grapes as big as hazelnuts, hazelnuts, whose flavor I never understood, nor why they were only eaten around Christmas time , like walnuts and other goodies.

My mind still remembers "the gifts" from Mr. Gustavo the winemaker when we did him some other favor at that time when sales were doubled: a box of Del Monte raisins to distribute between two, a star, (sweet) hard like a stick, or a bunch of grapes, which was what I liked the most. Even after so many years, tastes, smells and those repeated words wrapped in wonderful wishes of prosperity come to my mind towards those to whom we addressed them with lavish enthusiasm. Merry Christmas! - the children repeated echoing the older ones… and a happy New Year! we ended the sentence with the force of a good omen sentence.

The poverty of that time, the memories of the table without a tablecloth or succulent dinners that accompanied my family year after year, could not and never will be able to extinguish the evocations of those Christmas messages that were addressed, essentially, to those who could celebrate it with dignity ... or unworthily, as the case may be. In those days of childhood, without awareness of religiosity, or of the importance of Christmas for humanity, the very expression "Child Jesus" inspired me with respect and a tender, deep and mysterious love that it would be difficult to explain with human words.

Years later, God and the little boy Jesus disappeared from my life and I didn't see them anymore. 40 years passed, perhaps a longer time that is no longer worth remembering. But God did not disappear alone. With him went the apples, hazelnuts, grapes, the words and the good wishes that we uttered with sordid joy as December began. Denying God suddenly became a sign of goodwill among men. New effigies and statues appeared to replace the living God. The word was erected as an anvil for human hammers, erratic owners of false and deceptive inconsistent materiality. The return to contemporary Pharisaism, more sneaky and marginal than 2000 years ago, has become a moralistic doctrine with miserable holocaust edges.

A better world may be possible, but without God, it is a utopia. Without Him, all probability of improvement of this planet - by the way, created by himself since the beginning of time - will be conditioned by disasters, circumstances and scenarios that man himself would produce in order to survive. If human survival will be the result of any effort to make this world better at some point in history, the price would be too high to start working on the possibility of its improvement. How easy it would be to turn to God!

God has reappeared on our Cuban farms and with Him apples, walnuts, grapes and… Christmas. The gifts wrapped in cellophane and colored ribbons are back. Humanly, when I see the gift baskets go by with their creaking cellophane and their elaborate ornaments, I feel a childish joy within me. Christianly, I feel a deep compassion for this world where tens of thousands of children die every day who did not even have one Christmas.

Christendom celebrates the one and only Christmas in hopes of a better world. And of course it is possible! Emanuel is here with us. His unconditional love amazes us. His presence in our lives today is enough to celebrate his birth. His children only need him at Christmas, because He is Christmas. We are immensely rich, fabulously blessed. From the light of that manger that illuminated the darkness 2,000 years ago and continues to illuminate our lives today, we proclaim: Thank you Lord for your Christmas! Thank you for being here in our country, and because despite denying you for years and continuing to deny you in all possible ways, you have never left!

Merry Christmas!