El Wiwichu

There's so much that I love about the holidays. My earliest Christmas memories are all filled with abundance and magic.

I think one of my favorites happened as we were learning the language and the customs of our new adopted country. Our default greeting was always "Feliz Navidad." But here in the U.S. things were a little different.

Our Cuban tongues that could so easily roll R's into oblivion were a challenged by the Christmas greetings we heard around us.

Merry Christmas came out sounding more like, "Meri Cree-mah," all Cuban accented, broken and abrubt syllables. And then there were the new songs we were learning in school. (I started 1st grade here in the U.S. without speaking a word of English.)

Our favorite was something we called, "El Wiwichu."

That's right. It goes something like this:

"Wiwichu ah Meri Chree-mah, Wiwichu ah Meri Cree-mah, Wiwichu ah Meri Cree-mah. Ana hapi niu yiah."

As I send out my Christmas cards, I can't help but think of El Wiwichu.

And it makes me smile.

Merry Christmas, my friends.

The Great Christmas Card Challenge of 2011

I love the tradition of exchanging Christmas cards. I don't know if my parents ever sent out Christmas greetings, but I remember being 18 years old and buying my first pack of Christmas cards. My family had just moved to Orange County from the Los Angeles area where I had left all of my old friends. 

It was 1973 and I was still regularly communicating with them via U.S. mail. So sending Christmas greetings seemed to be a very natural thing.

In 1976 my local one-hour photo booth started offering Photo Holiday Greetings. I jumped on that one immediately and have never missed a year. I, personally, love getting Photo Christmas cards. I love seeing friends change from year to year. I love watching their families grow and their kids change. I save each and every one in that year's Christmas album. 

This year, I was looking for a photo to use for our card. I take thousands of photos so that shouldn't be too difficult. Except for the fact that I wanted something with all 6 of us in it. And Adam lives somewhere at the top of California, 12 hours away. What to do?

I found a photo of all 6 of us from Lucy's graduation which I kind of adored. 

I was happy with how we all looked and I thought our personalities totally showed through and as you can see, we were all in it. But Lucy vetoed it because she has since cut her hair short and that photo was "sooo last year." (Technically, it was this year, and she's actually talking about the school year calendar, but that's not important right now.)

I also really love this one from when Adam came down to visit on Easter. How cute are we?

But again, Lucy and the short hair thing. I have no photos of the six of us together and Lucy's short hair. What to do?

I had to design my own, of course.

Hey, I'm Cuban. I'm all about "resolviendo.*"  (*that's the Cuban way to say "improvising.") 

Merry Christmas from the Darbys!