White Christmas

Navidad con nieve.

Serie: 'Bites of wisdom' (V)

I realize that this title is not synonymous with a Christmas in my home country - the United States - nor is it congruent with Christmas in a great many other countries, parts of Spain included.  But I grew up in Minnesota, a place I lovingly call MinneSNOWta.  My favorite thing to tell people about the cold there is that as the temperature drops, Celcius and Fahrenheit actually equal out (that is at around -40).  That’s a temperature that includes what we call ‘wind chill’ which you really do have to take into account, as that’s what it actually ‘feels like’.  Another way I describe that type of cold to people is that it simply hurts, and you generally try to avoid it as much as possible.  That being said, I often experience as much if not more cold in Spain as I do or did in the US, simply because in Spain I’m always walking around outside, while in the US I go between the car and a heated building all the time.

I’ve lived in Spain (in Logroño) for what’s going on 7 years now (4 years previously, and 3 years currently - though that’s another story).  My wife and four children are Spanish citizens, and I am fluent in tortilla and chorizo (ja ja!).  We raise our kids bilingual, and, as an English teacher, I enjoy every minute of it:  the dual-language acquisition, the code-switching, the false friends and the frenetic flexibility of it all.  An additional challenge this situation presents is raising kids with a sense of biculturalism.  It challenges me personally to identify what exactly my culture is, as the tongue-in-cheek retort that people use back home is that ‘we (white people) don’t have a culture’.  If you’ve never heard anyone say this before, I encourage you to read this recent article about the topic.

I will skip ahead and tell you that I discovered that I (and all people for that matter) do have a culture, and that as my family grows and matures I am increasingly eager to impart and disseminate that culture - its history, traditions and knowledge - to my next generation.  That means that baseball matters again, that you ought to know the names and relative locations of all 50 states and that you should have a passing knowledge of at least half of the US presidents (okay, maybe a third… okay, maybe a quarter).  Living outside my home culture also means that more lies on my shoulders as far as passing on this knowledge to my kids here in Spain, an ocean and a generation apart removed from the world I know/knew.  Try as I might, I know I will not be able to keep up, and I know that an experience THERE is ten times more than what I could describe or hope to relate to them.

Hence we come to the four-hour car rides through the mountains of Castilla and Madrid, the 10+ hour transcontinental flights, and living the dream of working online remotely… all for the sake of allowing the kids the chance to experience an authentic ‘White Christmas’.  Cue the Bing Cosby circa 1954 and the American-style Christmas music that sounds nothing like the Spanish villancicos that are curiously only sung by children.  For a month-long trip starting mid-December and ending mid-January, I figured that the probability of meeting a blizzard or, at the very least, a significant snowfall would be surefire.  Much to our surprise, and much different from last year’s winter, the weather was actually quite warm and free of snow.  I would have used the expression ‘much to our chagrin’ a sentence ago, but the truth is that my kids didn’t even know the difference!  When I saw small piles of snow, they saw mountains!  When I thought it was chilly, they thought it was freezing!  And so I learned that, without much previous context and experience, my children were ‘soft’ - though perhaps this was luckier in the end.  I do want them to return again someday, even if it’s in winter.

So, our trip did contain snow pants and boots and sledding and snowball fights and snowmen and scooping the snow from the driveway and scraping the ice from the windshields, even if it wasn’t to the extent that I had hoped.  I have found that what I hope and want for my children, similarly to what I hope and want for myself, is, ironically, not always what is best or most convenient in the end.  Future developments affect us and our circumstances faster than we’d like, at every present moment we age more than we care to admit, and even our memories of the past change probably more than we realize.  Life is uncertain, and that’s part of what makes it most exciting.  Like the ‘half’ blizzard we finally experienced on the day we left the United States for Spain, which was enough to delay our connecting flight out and nearly cause us to miss our second flight to Europe.  Our bags did miss the flight, however, and we’re still waiting to receive them with all of our Christmas gifts, books and souvenirs from America.  That experience was a first not just for my kids, but for me as well.  So, while I do have 40 years of experience and ‘firsts’ before them, I expect that perhaps we’ll share a few more before it’s all said and done. 

Trailer de la película 'White Christmas'.

Editor: Universidad Isabel I

ISSN  3020-321X

Burgos, España