Blocker is a parishioner at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Logan Heights. He lives in La Jolla.
Not having family connections in , I typically skipped the Christmas and New Year’s réveillons during my 16 years in Paris. Despite the cold, dark and damp season, the city and country were too interesting for me to feel left out. Réveillons entail festive dinners with special foods, often lasting the whole night after midnight Mass, in one case, and, in the other, through New Year’s Eve. The one has an air of piety, the other of pagan sensuality, with refined gluttony (foie gras, oysters, lobster, champagne, a parade of other fine wines) and commonly a royal hangover on Jan. 1. One New Year’s Eve, a friend, Brigitte Bohanich, did invite me, with a gang of amiable young people, to her family’s country home, an old former Catholic rectory, in a tiny Picard village. There she and guests staged the delicious French style of merriment that also conjures the magic at ’s wedding celebrations.
Another year, I assisted a Parisian priest in producing a large, free Christmas réveillon for the marginalized. The experience felt exotic, given my naïveté about poverty in those days and homelessness not having reached the scale we and the French are now inured to. While I handled some simple but (maybe!) key istrative tasks, the priest worked with donors, volunteers and contractors to set up on a lot in the huge, at the time tired-looking, convention and trade show campus, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. I suspect parishes and other Catholic institutions had selected the hundreds of guests invited to share hot meals and enjoy some meager entertainment inside a chilly, dimly lit tent.
My one haunting memory from that evening is of two attractive but pale, stick-thin women sitting nearby with their small children around them. I have speculated that they had left their partners, banded together, and were perhaps living in tiny hotel rooms, scrounging and depriving themselves to keep their children fed and in school. At least the event provided brief respite from hardship.
My American Jesuit priest friend, Father Matt, recently told me another story of brightening the light of Christmas. If you lived in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, in 2014, you probably wanted to get out of the city at year’s end. Because of the decades-old armed conflict between government forces, leftist guerrilla groups and right-wing paramilitaries, immense numbers of people had been displaced to the city. Many of them streamed back to their home regions for the holidays, taking a good part of the metropolis’ vibrancy with them. Father Matt, then in Colombia studying to become a priest, flowed with the tide on an eight-day mission to the region of El Nula, a small Venezuelan farm community on the edge of a large, grassy plain, far from both countries’ capitals and lacking resident priests.
When he walked across the international bridge near Cúcuta, Colombia, the Venezuelan border officials cut themselves a “tax” on the cash he had brought to buy a cheap TV in the country. At his destination, the welcome was warmer, as Father Matt and the rest of the visiting team helped reinvigorate religious life in a devout village in the vicinity of El Nula. The community sustained a religious culture in the absence of the institutional church, but the team tackled the backlog of sacraments like baptisms that had been on hold pending the arrival of “circuit-riding” priests. They made house calls and celebrated Mass in the village chapel every day at sundown. Nativity scenes abounded, and the people sang Indigenous Christmas carols, villancicos, a form rooted in the Renaissance. Hospitality toward the priests included gorging them on homemade hallacas, akin to Mexican tamales. Although there were no Christmas trees or winter darkness and the weather was hot and dry, Father Matt experienced the shared warmth and sense of celebration he knew from prior holidays.
In the days leading up to Christmas Eve, the priests readied the children for the Nativity play, explaining its meaning and helping the girls and boys make their costumes. On the evening of Dec. 24, the commemoration of the savior’s birth came to its fulfillment with the villagers assembled in the chapel, singing villancicos, watching the play and finally celebrating the Christmas liturgy.
