It’s the day after Christmas and we’re spending it with family and friends. But fret not! We’ve dug into the Latinx Files archives to bring you this Christmas-themed holiday essay from Roberto José Andrade Franco, an esteemed friend of the newsletter and staff writer at ESPN. This story was originally published Dec. 23, 2021.

“Mexican men are faster to cry the older they get.”

My mom would tell me something like that, in Spanish, each time my father, uncles, or older cousins cried during this time of year. She must have seen a confused look on my face when it happened. Because, and I’m not sure why, most times when it happened during Christmas Eve, it was men who were crying.

I used to love Christmas. I made some of my fondest childhood memories during this time of year when school let out and we’d return home for a couple of weeks. We lived in Colorado for a few years, driving back to Juárez during Christmas to reconnect with things we knew and the people we missed.

I’d split my time between my grandmothers’ homes in Juárez. They lived in the same neighborhood, just a street away from each other. So if I ever got bored at one home — or just didn’t like what they had to eat — I’d go to the other. But once Christmas Eve came, friends, family and neighbors would gather at my paternal grandmother’s house.

On that night, me and my cousins — who’d sometimes only see each other a few times a year — would play outside until the gun shots from celebration got louder and more frequent. Inside, there was dancing, drinking, eating, and laughing. There was singing and hugging which, when mixed with the right song, meant tears were coming.

I don’t enjoy Christmas anymore. Difficult to ignore how much things have changed so I struggle during this time of year. That my grandmother died around this time and part of the family died with her. That cousins — some younger, some around my age — aunts, and uncles unexpectedly passed and took another part of the family with them.

Maybe it was because they were the only way we knew how to celebrate, but we tried keeping the same traditions alive even after they were gone. But from year to year, it became easy to notice the posada song verses getting shorter and shorter. Just like, with my grandmother dying and us losing one more safe space to gather in Juárez, you can feel the gulf between our binational family get wider and wider. You could see the number of people there, getting candy after kissing the feet of the baby Jesus statue, shrinking smaller and smaller.

Last year, the celebration was as small as it’s ever been. My wife, daughter and I lived in North Texas, about a nine-hour drive from home, and spent Christmas alone. El Paso had become a national COVID hotspot. Things in Juárez weren’t any better. Surreal to watch the national news and feel so helpless. To watch death overwhelm the system so entirely that in El Paso, refrigerated trailers got used as a mobile morgue. There was nothing to celebrate last year since my cousin — who might as well have been my older brother — was among the hundreds of bodies inside those trailers. Instead of getting together, we all just stayed away.

For me, that’s one of the many odd things about living in the pandemic. That you eventually learn to exist within the panic that’s so consistent it’s ingrained itself to life. But it’s in the moments you used to celebrate together but can’t any longer, when all that’s been lost becomes clear. That this life isn’t what it was back when I remember seeing my father, uncles and older cousins, singing songs while surrounded by things they knew, which in its own way, reminded them of the very things they missed. Things that, for that night, they partly reclaimed through a memory brought on by a song.

I’m almost certain that’ll happen this year. I’ll hear a song — likely from Juan Gabriel or Vicente Fernandez — that’ll remind me of someone who now only lives in my memories and sporadic dreams. Songs that’ll make me think about who might be missing next Christmas and make my throat tighten. And maybe my mother will see that and, noticing a confused look on my daughter’s face, she’ll tell her the same thing she’d tell me on the night, each year, when I’d see grown men cry.

It’s hard but I’m trying to enjoy Christmas again. So that my 4-year old daughter’s childhood memories of this time of year are warm and happy just like mine were. We’ve all lost so much, maybe we can have that.

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