From my childhood years I remember two very special times, the Christmas season and the August vacations. In both of them my normal life was suspended, daily routines were altered and an atmosphere of novelty was installed in which anything was possible.
The first thing that changed with the arrival of Christmas was the weather, in Caracas the temperature became colder than usual. In the west, where I lived, the fog would descend earlier. Sometimes at three o'clock in the afternoon everything was already a white blanket where you could not distinguish a person located one meter away, in those days people used to wear jackets of all kinds, one of the signs that I associated with Christmas.
From the first days of December my family started the Christmas decoration. The first thing they put up was the tree, at that time there were no synthetic ones, only natural ones.
On the first weekend of December, the older boys of the block would climb the Avila Hill or the nearby Junquito Mountains. With machetes they would cut the best branches with their hands and then walk kilometers with them until they reached our houses.
After the tree, the preparation of the nativity scene began. The custom was that each year it had to have more things than the previous one, even if it was only one more figure.
One of my uncles was the one who planned everything. He would start by moving the furniture from the living room to open up the space, some of that furniture was kept in a room until the beginning of February when the nativity was dismantled.
In my house the nativity scenes referred to the different regions of the country, representing the plain, the jungle, the sea and the mountains. One of the most difficult parts was to simulate the sea, for this we made beautiful paintings on paper and used cotton to place it on the crests of the waves.
These births were made in a staggered form, each region occupied a step. In the highest part a grotto with the Holy Family was placed, and the baby Jesus remained covered until the night of the twenty-fourth.
The best days of Christmas were the twenty-fourth and the thirty-first of December. On those two days total freedom was decreed for the children. The adults would forget about us and let us go out in the street, it was the only time of the year when that happened. My brother and I would go exploring the neighborhood and sometimes we would take walks for miles in the cold night, distracted by the parties we saw in every house. That image of us wandering the streets is one I remember most about Christmas days.
The other great time was school vacations. My father would arrange for his vacation from work to coincide with school. Preparations would start as early as May. My mother would put pressure on our studies with the threat that if we did badly there would be no vacation that year. But we never stopped having them.
Every year we would visit the family who lived in the interior. One year we would visit our mother's family and another year we would visit our father's family. Both families lived towards the West, the farthest one was my father's, which was in the state of Táchira, near the Colombian border.
Each of those trips opened up a world of novelties for us. In each place there were customs very different from the ones we had in the capital
Many of the houses we visited, especially those in the countryside, did not have electric lights, they were lit with candles and lanterns made with oil lighters. That was one of the things I didn't like because in those places the darkness of the night felt stronger and that made me very afraid.
Another thing I missed was the piped water, in those houses the water was stored in pipes and to bathe or go to the bathroom you had to carry several jerry cans. My mother, as always, made things easier for us, often carried the jerry cans and heated the water so that we would feel more comfortable with the shower.
Everywhere we went there was a little adventure. One of the things I liked was to accompany an uncle, my mother's brother, to pick up the goats in the evening.
At about five o'clock my uncle would grab a thick stick and a slingshot, like the one David used to defeat Goliath. With that sling my uncle was able to throw large stones with absolute precision, he could kill a goat with one stone.
We would walk through the mountains and my uncle would throw stones close to where the goats were, thus forcing them to find their way to the corrals. He always knew how many there were and if we arrived at the corral and one was missing, we would go back to the mountain until we found it. Once in a while it would be night before we finished rounding up the herd.
Another memorable moment of my childhood was when my paternal grandmother moved to La Guaira, a coastal place very close to Caracas. Almost every weekend we would visit her, and I would spend the week counting the days with the illusion that Friday or Saturday would soon arrive when we would go to visit grandma. Since those years I learned to enjoy the sea very much, a pleasure that has accompanied me throughout my life.
As I write I realize, once again, that life has been very generous to me. Truly, to have beautiful childhood memories is a great fortune. I thank God for having allowed me to have all those experiences...
I am publishing this post motivated by the initiative proposed by my friend @ericvancewalton, Memoir Monday, in its seventeen week. For more information click on the link.
Thank you for your time.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version).
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