Christmas Remembrance

By Natalia Rodriguez

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As a child, the anticipation of Christmas was colossal. Particularly in the little town where I grew up. Temperatures dropped during this season and we would get a little respite from the hot tropical weather of Zacatecoluca, a small town southeast of the capital of El Salvador. The preparation for the town’s traditional festivities starts as early as November. These celebrations last the entire month. December was all about the celebrations in my mom’s hometown.

Christmas in Latin America is all about family, not the gifts, not the Christmas tree or the decorations but about spending and enjoying time with your family. The celebration is mostly focused on the 24th rather than the 25th. On Christmas Eve Dinner, families have amazing meals that are only prepared once a year, follow by fireworks for the kids. Meanwhile the adults wait for the clock to struck mid-night and celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

In our tradition, during the first week of December, my grandmother and I took out the dusty boxes that had been carefully put away the year before. I helped her put out her nativity scene and the small Christmas tree each year. I remembered that one year while we were working on our Christmas decorations she said: “Christmas is all for the kids, it’s all to make the kids happy. Old people like us have nothing to celebrate.” At the time I didn’t understand this statement. Many years later, I realized that it must have been difficult for both of my grandparents to bring back memories of long gone Christmases, memories of past years, when they celebrated Christmas as a family. A family that was mutilated, because their youngest daughter, Silvia Georgina Rodriguez Peña de Rodriguez, my mother, was forcibly taken away, never to be seen or heard from again. Even with this agonizing pain, they made the effort to be sanguine in order to make each and every Christmas as memorable as possible for me. What she really meant to say was: “Christmas is all for YOU, it’s all to make YOU happy.”

Every year, my grandmother took me shopping for a new outfit to wear on the night of the 24th.
Afterwards, we went firework and food shopping. I helped her prepare our exquisite dinners and in return she made sure that the letters I wrote to baby Jesus reached their final destination. After our late dinner, we sat outside our house to wish Merry Christmas to passersby and to some of our neighbors. The night of the 24th was a childless night in our street. Most of the kids that were my age and with whom I played had gone out of town. Their Christmas was spent with relatives that lived in other cities. They typically left that same morning and in most cases didn’t come back until the 26th.

I was practically the only child on that street, my grandfather had to help me with the fireworks. An activity that was not joyous for him yet he pretended to enjoy it.I was not supposed to be an only child, yet I was forced to grow up as one. My mother was beginning the third trimester of her second pregnancy when she was forcibly disappeared on June 23 of 1983. My little brother never took his first breath. His innocent life was taken away as the Salvadorian Army’s sponsored death squads took my mother’s life.

At Christmas time, it is the norm to receive visits from extended family or neighbors that are living in others countries such as the USA or Canada. Some kids had yearly visits from their parents during December. My father never visited me and it wasn’t because he didn’t want to. After my mother’s disappearance, he had fled the country in order to save his life. Thanks to his imposed exile, I didn’t become a complete orphan; I knew that I had a father living somewhere else. Somebody that I did not even remember. My father for many years was nothing more than a voice over the telephone. To return to our God forsaken country meant putting his life and our lives at the mercy of the death squads.

My childhood is filled with multiple fond memories of both my grandmother and my grandfather. I could easily write a book with my Christmas memoirs. Unfortunately, none of these memories include my mom, my little brother, or my dad. My Christmases with my mother were limited because of the bigotry that reigned in our country. I only spent two Christmases with her. During our first Christmas I was a newborn and the second one was a year later. I don’t have any memories of neither one, as I was too little to remember anything.

Christmas is a magical time for all kids and not necessarily because of the gifts. A child will cherish the time spent together with his or her mother, father and siblings. In my case, I remember both: the time I spent with my grandparents and the memories I don’t have with my mother and my little brother. As an adult, I have spent many Christmases with my dad. We have been able to recuperate some of the time that was lost. . However, I will never be able to recover the lost time with my mother and my little brother. The opportunity to create Christmas’ memories with them was abruptly and violently stolen just like both of their lives.

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Natalia Rodriguez reunited with her father in the United States at the age of 17. She attended the University of Houston and graduated as an industrial engineer. Currently, she works as a NPD project manager in the oil and gas industry. She continues to look for her mother’s remains. Her mother, Silvia Georgina Rodriguez Peña de Rodriguez, is among the estimated 10,000 Disappeared during the Civil War in El Salvador.

You can read more about Silvia Georgina Rodriguez Peña de Rodriguez’s Story here.