Electric Christmas lights
Hola. This is Barbara, your curator of cultural news from the Spanish-speaking world. With the holidays approaching, I’d like to share a single story with you. It shows how the very short days in the Northern hemisphere remind us of the lights we wish to see in the world irrespective of the religious attachment someone has. I love the story because it links a seemingly Christian-based US tradition with a Sephardic family that arrived in the US as “Turkinos” at the beginning of the 20th century, i.e. Jews from the Ottoman empire. Devin Naar tells us the story of Albert Sadacca who connected a series of battery-powered lights and strung those on a Christmas tree. He aimed to create the same illuminated effect as with candles, but safely. He reached his goal and started the tradition of illuminating a Christmas tree with electric lights. Thank you to the Washington Post for sharing this neat story.
Let me also use the upcoming holiday break to refer to some of the books that I read in 2022 and recommended in this newsletter. For me, this review has helped me to structure my readings and memories along the way through 2022. As said Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: «El recuerdo que deja un libro es más importante que el libro mismo.» (The memory of a book is more important than the book itself.)
Below, you find a short list of some of the fiction books that I read and discussed in my tertulias:
Begoña M. Rueda, Servicio de lavandería
Anika Fajardo, Magical Realism for Non-Believers
Mariana Enríquez, La hermana menor: un retrato de Silvina Ocampo
Mariana Enríquez, Nuestra parte de noche
Finally, I leave you with another piece of generated art, recollecting my memories of the Christmas lighting («alumbrados») Medellín is famous for.
Enjoy the holidays and come back to my tertulias in 2023.