Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 

Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On

Traditions are one of the first manifestations of a host country’s culture to which the immigrant gravitates upon arrival. Whether consciously or unconsciously, most of us adopt them as ours, even if sometimes we only celebrate certain aspects of it.

Christmas is a good example. Because I did not grow up with it, it was hard for me to understand what it meant to British people. Add to this the fact that I arrived in London in November’97, as shop fronts go Crimbo-mad, and you can imagine what an eye-opening experience it was. It did not take me long to learn that the Christian ethos that this annual holidays is attached to has given way to a more consumerist-driven celebration. Still, I do enjoy my time off with my family and catching up with family and friends.

However, other traditions have not had the same impact on me. Especially those that are late-comers. Black Friday is one of them. This retail orgy is a recent – and unwelcome, at least from me – phenomenon in the UK. It apparently started with online behemoth, Amazon, half a decade ago and caught on very quickly with other businesses.

Unlike the bathos that surrounds Christmas (at least its uplifting sentimentality comes garlanded with a certain, typical British charm), Black Friday is a cynical US-import exploit to squeeze every single last penny out of bargain-hunters. I usually give it a wide berth but this year a conversation with my children around the dinner table made me wonder why on earth a tradition-rich country like the UK needs to latch on to this thinly-disguised capitalist display of retail power.

On your marks! Ready! Shop!

The chat with my children centred on the discounts most shops were offering, especially online. The issue for me was that these were not discounts at all. 15% or 20% knock-offs are still dear, especially when the original price is in the hundreds of pounds. It makes you ponder on the wisdom of shoppers and their ability to spot a good clearance or the lack of it thereof.

I confess that I felt funny having these thoughts about Black Friday. As usual my first reaction was: should I – a non-native of this country – be critical of this very recent US-led retail-friendly invasion?  Yes, I should, was my immediate answer. Not only because it is a most unwelcome sight (last year, there were overnight queues and brawls at some of the major stores on Oxford Street) but also because I am part of British life now and one of the steps towards acceptance of and assimilation to the host country’s culture is to occasionally feel aggrieved with the rest of my British compatriots when unwelcome phenomena like Black Friday make their presence known. You could say it is a right that arrived with my British passport in the post many years ago.

I had a Scrooge-like reaction when I heard that in the end Black Friday was not the success most retailers had hoped for. Either online or at the shops, the windfall expected fell way below what experts had predicted. There is hope, I thought, there is hope that maybe in a couple of years’ time Black Friday will be the equivalent of a horrible dream we all had and from which we woke up feeling confused. After rubbing our eyes we will, a few years hence, hopefully take stock of our surroundings, think of the things that really matter in this short life of ours and hit our pillow again; this time dreaming instead of the arrival of Christmas and the meaning of it.



© 2015

Next Post: “Killer Opening Songs”, to be published on Wednesday 9^th December at 6pm (GMT)

Let's Talk...

... About Christmas. And excuse me whilst I channel my inner Scrooge. From now on I won’t be so much the “A Cuban in London” as “the Cuban version of Ebenezer in London”. I bet you anything that the first comment left in the box below tonight will be “Bah, humbug”. Well, bah-humbug back to you, my friend!

When does Christmas really start? Is it when mince pies go on sale (I saw some on a display window in Shropshire back in August when I was there. I kid you not!), or perhaps when my weekend papers begin to assault my senses with endless John Lewis, PC World/Currys and M&S A5 catalogues? How about when the lights of your town centre are switched on? Mine have been beaming out their Christmassy electric energy since mid-November.

Let’s talk about Christmas indeed. More specifically about our modern notion of the birth of one of the most important figures in the history of mankind: Santa Claus.

Despite my previous words, I do not despise Christmas. But, not having been brought up with the tradition (we used to celebrate Christmas’ Eve back home. However, even that was hush-hush as Fidel’s government clamped down on all things religious), I find myself at a loss over what is considered proper Crimbo etiquette. What I have noticed is that there is an unhealthy commodification around this yearly celebration.

That is why I think that Scrooge was on to something. You might have thought I was joking when I invoked his spirit at the beginning but, in reality, Charles Dickens gave us a visionary in Ebenezer. A prophet who saw the shape of future Christmas to come. Or at least the ghost of them.

Miser or visionary?

Scrooge has always been accused of being tight-fisted. Yet what he really represented was the resistance to the market forces that were already making themselves felt in Victorian Britain. He was thrift versus future profligacy. He got labelled (undeservedly in my opinion) a miser. How unfair, I say! All he was doing was alerting the world to the Wongas of the noughties. The payday loan companies whose annual interest rates can reach up to 5,000%. True, Scrooge lost his fiancée Belle. His critics blame his procrastination. He wanted to hit the jackpot before saying “I do”. But what man does not want to provide for his beloved? Especially in those pre-feminism years when women still did not have the vote and marriage was just another way to keep them down? I think Scrooge was way ahead of his time here and by hoarding saving his money, he taught future generations how to administer their cash better.

Ebenezer did not despise the poor. He loved them! But he knew what was coming to them. He could smell it (God, he had a huge nose. At least in the screen versions). Bad credit cards habits, debts, round-the-clock advertising, mental and spiritual poisoning of the young, you name it, our modern version of the yuletide season covers them all.

Let’s talk about Christmas. Especially, let’s talk about the real meaning of it now that secularism has given the Overweight Citizen from the North Pole the heave-ho-ho-ho. Is it family time with Morecambe and Wise on telly? Clad in our new PJs and gorging on chocolates? Frantically and aggressively tearing up the impressively wrapped presents from friends and relatives? Taking a selfie? Discreetly putting aside one of the aforementioned presents? Checking your status on Facebook, whilst your mum goes to the kitchen to check on the turkey? Discussing the meaning of life? Having yet another chocolate and promising yourself that “no, no, this will be the last one”? Taking another selfie?

Scrooge’s intention was to rein in this excess. Maybe he went about it the wrong way. But his message of simplicity ought to be heeded in our current race to exterminate ourselves through shopping. In the meantime, pass us some mince pies, will you?

© 2013

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 1^st December at 10am (GMT)

Living in a Bilingual World (Allegro Moderato)

Christmas has always posed a major problem for the bilingual in me. Until ten years ago most of the phrases I use in English now related to this particular December festivity were unknown to me even in my native Spanish.

Christmas in Cuba was always a hush-hush subject. The reasons were plain for everyone to see. Religion was taken out of the equation shortly after the incumbent government took control of the country. But as an ex-colony of the Spanish empire the main celebration before 1959 was always Christmas Eve or Noche Buena as we call it in our mother tongue. A big supper at 12 midnight marked the birth of one of the most controversial figures ever.

In my house my late Grandma did maintain the Christmas Eve big supper tradition and despite my cousin's links to the Youth Communist League and my late auntie's membership of the Communist Party's a shindig was held every 24th December with most of my relatives coming from far away in the countryside to eat the roast pork laid on the table.

When I arrived in Britain one of the first tasks I had to face was how to learn the new words that involved the Christmas festivities and translate them into Spanish for my offspring. No easy feat this, as many of these terms were not used in Cuba at all since they were clearly rooted in Castillian Spanish.

The gamble has paid off, though, Im glad to say, as my own children recognise that sometimes I'm lost for the meaning of a certain word in Spanish and we all strive to look up the more apposite translation in the dictionary.

In 2007, however, our Christmas celebration reached its zenith. The surprise arrived after devouring the tasty 'guanajo' (turkey) that Wife had cooked that day.

Wife had arranged a special 'Desert Island Discs' with Children, Mother-in-Law and Mother-in-Law's Boyf. We were to pick three tracks that had made a special impact on us in our childhood, younger years and adulthood. Of course, because Children have not been out of nappies for that long yet their choice was limited. However, as I mentioned before the songs they chose showed me how important the union of two cultures under the banner of respect and acceptance was. Amongst the tunes Son selected was Los Prisioneros' 'Estrechez de Corazon', featured already on this blog whereas Daughter went Brazilian and chose Tribalistas' 'Passe Em Casa', also included amongst my favourite Autumn Songs.

At some point during the velada (soiree) I could not help thinking what a marvellous phenomenon multiculturalism was. Here we were: Wife, born and bred in Britain, but of British and Gibraltarian ancestry, Mother-in-Law, born and brought up in Blighty but with some Irish blood in her veins and a whole career playing flamenco music behind her (her playing the guitar whilst accompanying Wife's Father was one of the songs we enjoyed that evening). Me, Cuban-born, of Chinese, African and Spanish ascendance and Son and Daughter with all this mix running through their young bodies.

And on the stereo amongst other types of music, rhythms from Spain and Latin America reminding us that we were just tiny particles in the immensity of this global multilingual universe.

Merry Christmas to you all.

Copyright 2008