Corn husk nativity scene. Photo by Sarah

It has been a Christmas of details.   One of those times when life doesn’t come together as a coherent picture, but rather coalesces briefly into meaning in a smell or sound, a stray reflection, the blink of awareness between one fleeting moment and another.  The air wafting in through the balcony door upstairs, smelling like wet pavement in summer, strangely light and breezy on the 24^th of December (strange, of course, because somewhere in the back of my mind I still think I should be smelling woodsmoke and snow).

The bright cold of December nights, the mountain chill deeply embedded in the stone walls of the house forcing us to dig through drawers for the long underwear we bought on sale in a Chinese department store.  Radishes in the Zocolo – those Christmasy shades of maroon and white and green, the rotund figures with furrowed faces, doing everything Oaxacans do in that ideal world of tradition – making tamales, harvesting corn, dancing.

The occasional gold shine of a streetlamp breaking up the darkness.  Tourists.  Oh, tourists!  Always looking up at something, always somewhere between enamored and confused.  I have been there so many times.  Makes me tired, vaguely nostalgic, mostly relieved watching them.

Rompope (heady Mexican eggnog) from my favorite juice stand.  The thick glug of it drunk from a small glass.  The bright stillness on Christmas afternoon, the city a Mexican snow globe of yellow and blue, only the slow circular movements of shuffling tourists like constantly drifting snow, everyone else whisked away somewhere to various traditions.

The taste of a candy cane.  That hard, artificial peppermint.  Butter.  Lots of it.  Buttery cookies, buttery potatoes, buttery chicken.  Christmas cookies dipped in coffee and the sensation of being suspended in middair for a temporary spell.

Blue sky and blue sky and more blue sky, brighter at Christmas, the spark in the Virgin’s nervous young eye.  Virgins.  Virgins amidst the humble moss of nativity scenes.  Virgins on the backs of cars.  Blinking Las Vegas virgins on glowing lamps.  Shiny metal virgins painted vivid yellows reds and greens.  Smooth dark virgins shaped from cool black clay.  The small nativity scene at La Casa de los Artesenias made from that thin shiny metal like aluminum foil, thin metal sheep and thin metal reyes magos and a thin metal virgin with big arched eyes and a wide smile, and in the middle a blue baby Jesus fat and squiggly like a caterpillar.

Girl racing through poinsettas. Photo by Sarah.

Moss and poinsettas – the botanical twins of Navidad.  Poinsettas all over the Zocolo.  The constant rise and fall of chatter, families walking spread out on the andador in lines like horizontal family trees, kids running and jumping, firecrackers BAM suddenly BAM suddenly followed by my instinctual winces.

All these details and it feels like they surface and fade, surface and fade in these holidays.  Rhythms are all thrown off – things go fast then slow then fast then slow then really slow then really fast.  Finally you feel dizzy, tired, settling back into your life as if it were an old sweater.

So it’s been a holiday in details.  Just as in memories one smell, one image, one touch suffices to conjure up an era, in these days the details are standing in for the big picture.  Lifted glasses of rum, frigid shivering delicious nights, men with cigars, the sharp blast of heat from the opened oven.  And the sense of an impending New Year, that held-breath feeling of resuming something and starting something else, stepping bravely forward.