If you are a family with multiple cultures represented, a family that has immigrated to a new country, a mixed race family, an interfaith family, una familia multilingüe, an adoptive family, an expat family, a host family, holidays are a balancing act of choosing “which,” “how,” and “when” to incorporate the different traditions and customs.

In our family, my husband is from Mexico, I am from the U.S., and we have two biological daughters, and two sons who are adopted from China and Ethiopia. Out of serendipity, many important holidays from our four cultures fall within a 3-month period.

From November through January (and sometimes February!), our multicultural family celebrates Día de los Muertos, Thanksgiving, St. Nicholas Day, Día de la Virgen de Guadalupe, Las Posadas, Noche Buena, Christmas, New Year’s (both “western” and “Chinese/Lunar”), Genna (Ethiopian Christmas), Reyes Magos, and Timkat (Ethiopian, “Epiphany”) and a few birthdays. Whew! Just typing it out, I’m already making lists in my head of things I need to do and plans I need to organize.

At the beginning, when our kids were younger, we would haphazardly put things together at the last minute: “Isn’t tomorrow Reyes Magos? Should we get the kids something?” or “Let’s go out for Ethiopian food for Genna today.” We didn’t put a lot of thought into teaching the reason behind the traditions, or explaining why the holidays were celebrated and their cultural importance. In fact, because we didn’t have a plan, we would completely skip holidays sometimes!

When our older kids were about 6 or 7, my husband and I decided to make the traditions more intentional. Family traditions are a key component to healthy family relationships: they strengthen family bonds, teach our children our family values, give our kids a sense of identity and security within our family, and instill pride in our children as they develop their cultural heritage. Think about it: the traditions we make with our children create special memories that most likely, they will pass on to their children.

Traditions do not have to be complicated, take a lot of time, or cost a lot of money, but I would argue that they should be deliberate and repeated consistently in order for them to truly become a part of your family culture. In my type-A world, the first thing to do to get organized is to make a list.

And so, on a “date night” to the café at our local bookstore, my husband and I sat down with a notebook and made up a calendar of the holidays that we would like to celebrate with our kids and which traditions we wanted to incorporate. We each had a strong view of the US and Mexican inclusions, but China and Ethiopia required us to do additional research (both on-line and asking our Chinese and Ethiopian friends).

Some of the traditions are simple and quite common: hanging our homemade stockings by the chimney as I had always done as a girl; putting up the Nativity scene as a family as my husband had always done in Mexico; making Christmas cookies together. Others involve meshing traditions from two or more cultures: we now set up the Christmas tree while listening to Christmas music from around the world and eating tapas and Chinese dumplings, and this time of year we read tons of books about Christmas in Mexico and in the U.S.

We wrote everything down, even if it was just attending celebrations as a ritual: visiting the Ethiopian church festival for their Genna (Christmas) celebration; partying with adoptive families at the Chinese Consulate’s annual Chinese New Year event; going to our church for their Día de la Virgen de Guadalupe mass (that is always followed by folkloric dances and amazing food!).

It’s been three years since we’ve made the family calendar, and every year it seems we add new family traditions – sparklers on Noche Buena, a new annual museum exhibit for Dia de los Muertos, and we started inviting friends over every January for a rosca de reyes party. For our family, raising our children to be proud of their cultural background is as important as raising them to be bilingual. Celebrations and their corresponding customs are the perfect way to pass on your cultural values and heritage, don’t you think?

What are your favorite holidays traditions? How do you balance the different cultures in your family?

We’ve been in Texas since Friday spending time with some really good Mexican friends we consider family. We’re preparing everything for our New Year’s Eve celebration tonight and as I was checking to make sure we had enough grapes for everyone to eat 12 at the stroke of midnight, I started thinking of all the other traditions/superstitions Latinos have related to Año Nuevo.

12 uvas de la suerte

This tradition is originally from Spain, but has been adopted by many Latin American countries including Mexico. Tradition dictates that when the clock strikes midnight, you have to eat 12 grapes and make a wish with each stroke of the clock.

The 12 grapes represent the 12 months of the year and the idea is that by eating a dozen grapes, you’re ensuring the 12 months ahead will be good and prosperous ones.

¡A viajar!

If you want to travel, this is one I remember my mother doing every single year. All you have to do is go for a walk around your neighborhood with your suitcase before the clock strikes midnight. Some recommend you go around the block, but the other option is to cross the street in front of your house with your suitcase. I like this last option better now that I live in Colorado and it’s usually freezing cold on New Year’s Eve.

Green is for dinero

Many Latinos believe strongly that the color underwear they wear on December 31 will dictate the kind of luck they’ll have in the New Year. If you’re looking to attract love you need to wear red underwear.

For good luck or to attract money you better be wearing yellow. Although in some countries green is more closely associated with financial well-being and yellow with positive energy. I figure it doesn’t hurt, so why not?

Sweeping away todo lo malo

Nothing worse than starting the new year surrounded by negative energy. Hence, many people believe in sweeping the entrance to their home to get rid of it. Others put dollar bills near their front door and sweep them inwards to assure prosperity and financial good luck.

Others don’t sweep, but they fill a bucket or glass of water, open their front door and throw it out. The idea is the same: get rid of any bad energy and start the year as clean as possible.

I’ve never done this one, but maybe I should — especially the one with the dollar bills!

What New Year’s Eve traditions do you have?

{Photo by GoodNCrazy}

The very first Thanksgiving my husband and I spent together, was only three months after we had met and started dating.What a valiant boyfriend, to accept an invitation home to meet my family on one of my family’s favorite holidays! This intimidating family feast included 60 of my aunts, uncles and cousins in an animated sit-down dinner. As Toño followed the boisterous conversations, he may not have captured all of the English — but the warm hugs and laughter gave him insight into my family’s dynamics and values.

Not only did he meet my many relatives for the first time, this was also his introduction to the typical cuisine of Thanksgiving: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce and pecan pie. Toño and I fondly remember our first Thanksgiving, and marvel at how the holiday has evolved to be a bicultural family celebration that meshes our two cultures as we integrate Mexican flavors into traditional fare, and give thanks for everything that is important to us.

To begin our family holiday, the kids and I search for fallen tree branches to make our centerpiece: the “Árbol de la Gratitud.” I cut out leaves from colorful construction paper, punch holes, and carefully loop string through each one. Everyone is invited to write what they are thankful for — en español of course — and then hang their hoja on the tree. We love to read what each child appreciates and is thankful for, whether it is our family and friends, our pets, our house or favorite toys. “Gracias por mi escuela y maestra” was one of my favorite leaves, written in wobbly letters that seemed intent on conveying their important message.

We also incorporate some Latino flavors into the Thanksgiving dinner, by taking the conventional dishes and tweaking the seasonings. For example, we might begin with a brown sugar, chipotle and cumin rub on the turkey, which adds just a bit of smoky heat. Our cranberry sauce has a tropical flair with added tamarindo paste, and for a salad we love to make “Ensalada de Nochebuena.” Normally eaten on Christmas Eve (with turkey!), this colorful, cold salad includes beets, jicama, apples and peanuts in a cinnamon-infused orange juice dressing. The pastel de elote (a sweet corn bread) and dulce de camote (sweet potato candy) are served beside pumpkin and pecan pies for dessert.

I have been told that infusing Central and South American ingredients facilitates the adoption of Thanksgiving traditions into the Hispanic community. Whether it is a roast turkey, turkey mole or tamales de pavo, the ever-evolving menu and blending of cultures is truly a reflection of our diverse nation. No matter what is served at this special meal, people around the United States acknowledge that Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on our blessings and share our table with loved ones. Though many of us live far away from our families, we gather with our dearest friends to share our bounty and celebrate this holiday.

However we celebrate Thanksgiving, and whatever food we choose to serve, the true beauty of this holiday is to show our gratitude and appreciation for all that we have. No matter what culture we are from, the idea of being thankful for everything we have is one of the most valuable lessons we can teach our children.

Here’s hoping you have a Happy Thanksgiving!

The biggest fights in the early part of my marriage revolved around a recipe. A Thanksgiving recipe. For stuffing no less! It sounds absolutely ridiculous to me now, typing those words out loud — and frustrating that we wasted so much emotion over an innocuous mass of old bread and drippings. But then, it really wasn’t a battle of corn versus white bread to begin with. If this fight had a name it would be Babita v. Hazel, the battle of two people trying to preserve their grandmothers’ legacies.

Babita was my husband Adrian’s grandmother. She lived next door with her husband (named Babito, of course) raising Adrian and his sister alongside their parents. Babita emigrated from Cuba in 1962,  but she adopted the American Thanksgiving wholesale, cooking up the traditional meal — you know, turkey bathed in mojo and naranja agria (sabrosósimo) with black beans and rice. Lacking her own recipe for stuffing she found two. One she clipped from the local Spanish-language newspaper and is rich with apples and nuts. The other is thick with ham. My husband, keeper of the family recipes, now safeguards both inside a worn cookbook from his grandmother’s Havana finishing school. Each year, he pulls the recipes from La Cocina en el Hogar, makes his shopping list, then sets out to find the butcher in his parents’ neighborhood who can ground the ham  just right.

Me, I inherited my recipes from my grandmother Hazel, who grew up on a dairy farm in rural Virginia. The farm produced enough milk each day to fill a cart that the Neale kids and their horse Fancy delivered to town on their way to school. Her family’s recipes are thick with butter, cream, more butter, and a little corn for good measure. They are also sabrosísimo. It is not Thanksgiving without the Neale family, sage-infused cornbread stuffing.

And therein lies the rub. Our first years together, neither my husband nor I could imagine a Thanksgiving without our own family’s stuffing, nor a Thanksgiving with three stuffings. Our kids didn’t care — they don’t even like stuffing. But that didn’t stop the  tension. There may have been a few barbs of ‘my stuffing is better than yours’ in there, maybe. Maybe that was me. I’m not proud of it, but… entire family legacies were at stake.

One year we finally agreed: In addition to the peaches with mincemeat, corn pudding, brussel sprouts, sweet potatoes, cranberry crumble and pie, we would prepare all three recipes. Peace has reigned in our home ever since. I won’t try to persuade you which recipe is best, though I clearly have my favorite. I’ve left two of the recipes at the bottom of the post, in case anyone would like to try them. I will tell you one thing. My husband is in the kitchen right now, preparing stuffing for his office potluck tomorrow. Smells amazing. And the recipe he is using has an awful lot of butter and corn bread.

From Babita

Relleno de pan al estilo antiguo (source: newspaper)

• Una y media tazas de cebolla, finamente picada
• Una y media tazas de apio, finamente picado
• Un tercio taza de mantequilla
• Ocho tazas de cubitos de pan viejo (cortados de 1-2”)
• Una y media cucharadita de pimienta
• Media cucharadita de sazonador para ave
• Media cucharadita de salvia
• Un cuarto taza de agua
• Un huevo, ligeramente batido

En una sarten se saltean la cebolla y el apio en la mantequilla caliente, hasta que estén tiernos. Se añade a los cubitos de pan colocados en un tazón grande. Se espolvorean con las especias y se mezcla todo bien. Se añade el agua al huevo ligeramente batido y se agrega a la mezcla de pan, revolviendo con un tenedor. Es cantidad suficiente para rellenar un pavo a 12 libras. Da 9 tazas de relleno.

Babita’s second recipe for ham stuffing is handwritten, and there are a few odds and ends thrown in with the ingredients list (papel de cocina y baño) as if the paper doubled as her shopping list. We’re never quite sure on the portions, so we won’t include it here.

From Hazel

Cornbread Dressing (adapted for the modern cook, and reconstructed from memory by my mother)

• 3 boxes of Jiffy corn bread mix (made ahead)
• 4 cups of onions finely chopped
• 2 1/2 cups celery finely chopped
• 1 1/2 tbs poultry seasonings
• 2 sticks melted butter
• 4 eggs well beaten
• 2 cups of turkey stock (though good quality chicken stock will do)
• 1 1b of Italian sweet sausage, removed from casing and browned, or 1 pkg of Jimmy Dean turkey sausage in a round tube

Saute the onions and celery in butter or olive oil in a large pan. Brown the sausage.

In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients and either stuff the turkey or bake in a separate pan covered at 350 for 45 minutes, uncover the last 10 minutes.

We usually make a small patty of the stuffing and fry it in a small pan to check the seasonings before stuffing the bird, so that there is time to correct.

{photo by  lookslikeamy}

Thanksgiving — the date in November — has never meant much to me. When I was growing up, I was in Costa Rica, and the fourth Thursday in November was just another day. My brother and I were busy with school, my parents with work. My American father would usually make a casual comment in reference to the day, and I had memories of spending Thanksgivings past with his family in California when I was very little, but that was about it.

Thanksgiving as an event, however, is a completely different story. Because my father absolutely loved Thanksgiving. And every so often he would proclaim, out of the blue, “Hey, let’s have Thanksgiving!!” Sometimes we would actually celebrate on a weekend in November. Sometimes in March. Sometimes several times a year. Really, whenever my father felt like it.

With that phrase, we were all in and Thanksgiving was ON. Our very first Thanksgiving was shortly after we moved to Costa Rica, in honor of my American grandparents’ visit. Turkeys were remarkably hard to come by in Costa Rica in the early eighties, however. I remember driving all over the Valle Central with my grandfather and my dad, who had a lead on where to find a turkey. According to my mother, after two days all we found were a few scrawny chompipes, and the farmer was unwilling to sell them, anyway. She doesn’t remember whether we ended up having chicken or canned ham that Thanksgiving, but it definitely wasn’t turkey. Later in the decade a gourmet butcher’s shop that catered to the small but growing expat community opened in the ritzy part of town. They had turkeys, but they were so expensive that my father would buy one and ask the butcher to saw it in half — one for Thanksgiving now, one to freeze for Thanksgiving later. The butcher thought he was crazy.

My Costa Rican mother cooked a mean Thanksgiving dinner. She had lived in the U.S. with my father for a few years and had learned everything she knew from my Grandma Stevens. She had a Thanksgiving notebook where she had written down her recipes for the turkey, stuffing, and gravy, all of the traditional family recipes that had been passed down. When we had visitors from the U.S. (and there weren’t that many of them in those days) they were always asked to bring us one or two cans of cranberry sauce, which was impossible to find. If we were lucky, they had room in their suitcases for a couple of cans of cherry pie filling, too. And there were no pumpkins to be had in Costa Rica, but my father, a baker, experimented with several kinds of squash until he found the one that made the best pie.

And when word got out that we’d be having Thanksgiving, my Costa Rican relatives came in droves. There are stories of my Abuelito fasting the entire day before our Thanksgiving dinner, he loved it so much. My mother’s family is huge and it’s a small country, so there was no travel, no stress, no plane tickets to be bought, no drama. Just good food, and family that was more than willing to rally at a moment’s notice to indulge my father and his American ways whenever he felt like celebrating.

My father is gone now, and the Thanksgiving dinner torch has now been passed, but not to me. Fittingly, it now belongs to my brother’s Costa Rican wife. I was there for her first cena de pavo and watched as my sister-in-law carefully copied down the recipes from my mother’s trusty notebook in Spanish for herself, and my mother spent two days walking her through it. Now her Thanksgiving dinners, exactly like those my grandmother used to prepare, are as renowned among our blended family as my father’s dinners used to be. The only difference is that unlike my father, she can easily pick up a frozen turkey at a store nearby.

My father taught me that you can have Thanksgiving whenever you feel like it. Nowadays, when November rolls around, I feel like I’m exempt from the expectation of making big plans or traveling, and fortunately, my husband feels the same way. We’ve started our own tradition of just celebrating Thanksgiving right here at home, and we invite anyone else who’s staying in town to join us. Our Thanksgiving has become a casual gathering of friends, neighbors, colleagues from work. Some faces are constant, some change every year. My only contribution to dinner is the homemade cranberry sauce and a sweet potato pie.  There are no traditional recipes — my husband, the chef, experiments with new recipes every year.

I’ve told my husband the story of my father’s Costa Rican Thanksgivings many times, and he likes the idea. And I think that maybe sometime in the spring, I could say, “Hey, let’s have Thanksgiving.” And he just might go for it.

{Photo by vxla}

Editor’s note: While we spend a lot of time talking about Latin American traditions, truth is we’re raising bicultural children. Since nothing could be more representative of American culture than Thanksgiving, we decided to bring you a few essays related to this tradition, which most Latinos have so happily embraced. After all, how can we say no to food, family and being grateful, right?

Thanksgiving gives us a chance to reflect on our lives to be aware of and thankful for the many blessings that we have. We always celebrate this holiday with my husband’s family, and it is always guaranteed to be a multilingual and multicultural affair. Both my mother and father-in-law immigrated to the United States as adults. My mother-in-law came from Germany, and while my father in law is technically Dutch, he spent the first twelve years of his life growing up in Indonesia when it was a colony of Holland.

I love that my husband grew up with other languages. His parents are very supportive of our raising multilingual children since they have always had multiple languages in their home. Speaking other languages is not only valued, it is the way it has always been in my husband’s family. The languages used around the Thanksgiving table are a mix of Spanish, German, English, Dutch and a smattering of Indonesian as well.

The real emphasis of our Thanksgiving is a profound awareness and appreciation for the life, freedom, and opportunities that we have in the United States. Having the family together to share so much delicious food makes my in-laws particularly aware of how blessed they truly are. They will usually remind those of us in the younger generations that our lives are pretty good. Seeing life from their perspective helps us to appreciate our blessings rather than take them for granted.

My mother-in-law spent her formative years growing up in war torn Germany. Since her father was deceased, her mother was forced to flee their hometown all alone with two young children. As refugees in their own country, the family was looked down upon and discriminated against always searching for food and shelter. My mother-in-law’s strongest memories from her childhood are being cold and hungry.

My father-in-law spent five years in a Japanese concentration camp with his mother and disabled sister.  His father was forced into hard labor causing the family to be separated until the war finally ended. Lack of freedom, fear, hunger and not knowing if his father was alive or dead plagued my father-in-law’s childhood.

While being at the Thanksgiving table surrounded by all of that delicious food, their children and grandchildren, my in-laws will remember those tough times and share stories with us. We realize that no matter what problems or difficulties we may have in our lives, overall things are pretty good. Reflecting on the past makes us thankful for the life that we do enjoy.

My in-laws came to the United States to start over and find a better life. While they built a new life in their adopted country, they kept the cultures and languages alive from their homelands. At Thanksgiving we are even more aware and appreciative of that freedom to live a multilingual and multicultural life in peace and happiness.

{Photo by Mark Mrwizard}

Almost a month has passed since el quince de septiembre, Costa Rican Independence day. That weekend I set up a meeting point with a good friend, also a tica, gathered up my sons and our Metro cards and we trekked up to the Costa Rican Embassy in Washington, D.C. to check out the festivities, the third year in a row we’ve done so.

I can always bribe my children with a ride on the bus or the Metro, because there are few things they love as much as taking the Metro somewhere. So they were excited to go this year…but not as excited to stay. The embassy isn’t really big enough to accommodate the crowd that gathers every year. There were tons of people and no room to walk around. The music was loud. The line for the food was unbelievably long. For my two autistic boys, it was simply too much. Secondo spent most of the time we were in line humming to himself loudly in order to block out the noise. Primo dealt with it by occasionally sprawling out on the ground and staying there — and I let him.  We got our food, and I got my much-needed Imperial beer. We stayed long enough to sing the himno nacional and then headed back home.

I have many memories of my parents going to great lengths to make U.S. culture, history and politics come alive for my brother and me when we lived in Costa Rica back in the eighties. We often spent the Fourth of July at the U.S. Embassy, where we sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” ate hot dogs and ran sack races. We all got to break the No-TV-During-Dinner rule and watch CNN if a major story was breaking. My father — a staunch Democrat — dragged us out of school and took us to the embassy so that we could hear both George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle speak on official visits, because there was no way we were going to pass up the opportunity to hear the President and Vice President speak.

I’ve always dreamed about doing similar things with my boys. We are lucky to live in an area with such a wealth of cultures, where embassies hold all kinds of events and it seems like a festival is going on every weekend. And while I knew that doing these things would not be feasible at first, with two babies and a bulky double stroller, I looked forward to the day when we could do them.

Once the double stroller and diapers were history, we started going places…with mixed results. An afternoon at the Museum of Natural History ended with an epic meltdown within minutes of our arrival, so we played outside instead. And now the meltdowns are fewer because Primo and Secondo are increasingly able to express themselves more articulately. I recently showed Secondo a flyer advertising a Hispanic Heritage Month event. Music! Dancing! Typical foods! it proclaimed. Secondo looked at it for a moment. “No quiero ir,” he told me.  “There will be too many people and it will be too noisy.” I was shocked — for years I’ve struggled to guess what he’s thinking and what he wants, and this time his wishes were crystal clear. I’ve longed for communication like this more than just about anything. Needless to say, I respected his wishes. We bagged the Hispanic Heritage Month Festival.

I hope as they get older they will find these events more enjoyable. They may or may not. As for the embassy next year, although there was something I loved about singing the himno nacional together, I’ve decided we won’t go if they don’t want to. But I will dig out my old copy of Lo que se canta en Costa Rica and maybe we can learn the himno at home.

{photo by  thombo2}

Do you ever wonder how your identity would be altered had you been born and raised in a different part of the country? The American Latino experience is vast indeed, but poignantly so when comparing the experiences of Latinos living on the polar coasts of our great nation.

As a Cuban growing up in the beach suburbs of Los Angeles, many years before communities such as ours at SpanglishBaby existed, there was truly only one reality for the Latino experience: Mexican. Where I was from, if you were brown and spoke Spanish, you were Mexican. Not even Latino. Not Hispanic. Certainly not Cuban. And while there are so many beautiful aspects of the Mexican culture that I admire and enjoy, they were not mine to identify with. Perhaps it was my small town of middle-income beach dwellers that lacked the cultural (and geographical) astuteness to realize the myriad of experiences Latinos encompass. Perhaps communities closer to the city center were more diverse, more sensitive, to all that the Latino experience can be. My coastal American Latino experience was not one of solidarity or camaraderie. I didn’t have a community of Latinos with similar Spanish accents, cultural traditions and loud-mouthed family members. Ultimately, as a West Coast American Latina, I didn’t really feel Latina at all.

Sometimes I wonder who I would be if I was born and raised on the other side of the country. I wonder who I would be if I lived in Miami, specifically. Even other parts of South Florida, where Cubans run ramped and so does the espresso, sipped in doll sized tea cups. I wonder, had I been raised on the Eastern seaboard, if I would think in Spanish. Or dream in Spanish. I wonder if I would have Spanish speaking friends. Maybe some from Peru. Or Nicaragua. And Mexico, too. My alternative identity would be sure of her brown skin, curly hair, quick tongue and wicked style. My other coastal identity would love to speak Spanish in public; she’d probably look down on Spanglish speakers like me. Even still, there are moments when I could feel that alternative identity surface, when I feel distinctly Latina, and it is a feeling of wholeness that is parallel to none.

I loved my beach bummed childhood. Spending hours upon hours sitting on long stretches of sand, listening to the ocean churn lullabies of quiet peace have most certainly impacted my identity. I’m a beach girl at heart, even now as I live in the middle of a desert I ache for the sway of the oceanic melodies. But as far as my American Latino experience, my coastal experience just didn’t cut it. And yes, sometimes I wonder who I would be if I was born and raised in a different part of the country.

{Photo courtesy of Vanessa}