Celebrating American Holidays With My Mexican Father

As a child, my father would always take my sister and I to the front door and repeat his favorite saying, “No me importa lo que diga Tom Bradley ni Ronald Reagan. De la puerta para allá es Estados Unidos, y de aquí para adentro todavía es México.”

For the first eight years of my life I was raised as holiday recluse. My father would get angry at me and demand to know why the bank was closed, why there was no mail sitting in the mailbox, and most of all, why I did not have to go to school. I told him it was Veteran’s Day, and he would call me a liar and tell me Veteran’s Day was in May and not in November. I would argue softly that day was Memorial Day, and he would tell me I was ridiculous for suggesting there was an addition holiday celebrating the armed forces, fallen or not.

The routine seemed endless.

He would get angry at the world for renaming the Day of the Worker, Labor Day and celebrating it in September. I would find oranges and peanuts inside of my shoes every January 5 in celebration of Día de los Reyes. I appreciated them although I misunderstood their relevance. I would show up at school after the holiday break with my treats, and although my classmates knew where they were from, they feigned ignorance better than I ever could. My father would struggle in his explanation as to how oranges and peanuts were part of Jesus’ birth while I struggled mightily to explain what a bunny had to do with Jesus’ death.

My father mellowed out and relented, eventually. My sister and I were even allowed to observe the door-to-door rituals of Halloween. However, there was always one basic rule. Since we were unwilling to compromise and simply share a costume, (i.e. I would be a doctor one block and then switch off with my sister) we would have to make up or own costumes with things around the house. My sister would always put on some of the teenage neighbor’s excessive make up and go as some hybrid neglected baby organism. I would simply put on some of my father’s pants along with a pillow as a cushion to give the illusion of a big bottomed hobo.

The only accessory my father would bring along would be two or three cans of Bud Light. We knew that trick-or-treating was coming to an end once he began swirling around his last drink.

The other holiday we had to sell my father about was Thanksgiving. This was a particularly arduous task because he did not like the taste of turkey. We only started celebrating Thanksgiving because his job gave him a free turkey and he did not want it going to waste. My mom did not know what to do with it exactly, so she made everything with it.

I learned to loathe turkeys after that first Thanksgiving. My mother made turkey tamales, turkey pozole and turkey mole. I was extremely weary when I tried the champurrado. Because, there wasn’t a guarantee that it would be completely free of turkey.

More than two decades have now passed, and I realize that the door my father alluded to so long ago has not been closed — not only does it remain open, but it defies geography and identity. I look at my godson now, and I try to motivate him to define the world, with or without holidays.

Follow Oscar Barajas on Twitter @Oscarcoatl