Sunday, December 27, 2009

Christmas 2009

I had a wonderful time during my Christmas Holiday. My daughter and I made the traditional Cuban Christmas eve dinner consisting of roasted pork, black beans, rice, fried plantains and lots o' Sangria. It's very good, but it is traditionally a "peasant" food. By peasant food I mean, that it is the food that is usually eaten by what Cubans term "Guajiros" or farmers, which are from the
country-side or mountains, and are the backbone of Cuba's tobacco and sugar cane crop harvest. As we all know, Cuba is an island, and thus seafood is the main staple of many Cubans since Cuba is a long, narrow island, and many of its main cities are near the ocean, making seafood the main diet of many Cubans (with the exception, of course, of the Guajiros who live inland and raise pigs and chicken as their main staple food). Peasant food or not, our Christmas eve meal left us all pretty satiated. As for gifts, my family and I don't exchange gifts in the traditional way. In fact, we don't even keep presents under our xmas tree (well, at least not since my daughter stopped believing in Santa Claus). What we do is we use the month of December to figure out what we want, and then we either get it before Christmas or after, or we plan a trip. For instance, my daughter wants to go to culinary school since someday she hopes to be a chef (and she does have the talent), so for Christmas she asked for a large Le Creuset Dutch Oven (a cast iron pot), so next week we are going out and buy one (those suckers are expensive...they run over $200). As for my husband and me, our Xmas present is planning a short, romantic vacation in the next few weeks (by short, I mean a long weekend somewhere fun, and Xmas gifts never include our yearly vacation, which will be going back to Spain and Italy this coming Spring). I know we are not traditional in many ways, but this is the way we celebrate our Christmas (plus my husband is Jewish anyway, so it works for him). Seriously, I can hardly plan Christmas due to my busy schedule, image if I had to plan for eight Hanukkah presents. Oy vey! :/

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