Memory: X'Tamal

Christmas Day 2011.  I hike up to Tzibal to say a quick hi to Estela and give her kids a few Christmas presents.  I arrive after lunchtime because I don't want Estela to feel compelled to feed me, which she of course does anyway.  Estela explained that Christmas Eve she just wanted to relax so she and her husband and kids stayed in and hung out. She didn't even get around to making Christmas tamales, she told me, embarrassed. I told her not to worry, that I'd been eating tamales all day anyway and wasn't hungry.  She looked a bit relieved.

Meanwhile word has quickly gotten out that I was in the village, and people start stopping by Estela's kitchen door to request my presence in their houses.  Estela, like the perfect agent she is, makes the executive decision that I only have time to make one other stop, and that stop would be with Doña Carolina.  So up we climb through the muddy jungle to Carolina's house, where they're holding a special Christmas service.  In we walk to a typical Tzibal house: one-roomed wooden shack with a corrugated tin roof and a dirt floor.  In this house are maybe 25 community members, sitting on long wooden benches facing the makeshift pulpit.  Up front, standing in front of an orange wooden bureau topped with a plastic piggy bank and a vase full of plastic flowers are five men, all in the typical campo uniform: collared shirt tucked into belted colored jeans and rain boots, pant legs tucked in.  Two of the men hold trumpets, one holds a guitar, one mans the keyboard, and the fifth stands in front holding Li Santil Hu, the Holy Bible translated into Q'eqchi'.  And alongside these men, stacked halfway to the rusted ceiling, stand a full set of giant Peavey speakers, turned up to full volume, powered by the rumbling generator in the corner. The sound level is near unbearable, but I sit it out, trying not to think of the damage being done to my eardrums. What is it about Guatemalans and their godforsaken Peavey speakers?? I've often asked locals why the volume level needs to be so high, but nobody seems to have an answer for me. My personal theory is that they're attempting to shoot the sound up to God in Heaven. That really is the only explanation to having that kind of volume in a wooden shack with an audience of twenty-five.

The service ends and we're served tamales and hot cacao.  Estela and I chow down, say our thanks, and leave, going down to the Catholic church to meet with some other women. They're all in the church kitchen getting the Kakik feast ready for later that night. We stand around the open fire pit and chat while Doña Carmen fries up some chicarrones.  They start talking to Estela and soon find out that she didn't give me a Christmas tamale, because she didn't make any.  I quickly chime in that I came to visit for the company, not the tamales, but the women are besides themselves. They start calling Estela "X'tamal," or Mrs. Tamale, laughing all the way.  "X'tamal invited Qana Jana for Christmas and didn't even make tamales!" they repeat between bursts of laughter.  The women all lost it--this, apparently, was the funniest thing ever, and they laughed and laughed and laughed.  Doña Carmen burned the chicharrones because she was too busy laughing.  And I laughed until I cried--laughter is contagious after all--for the first time in a long time.  In that moment I felt such a connection with these women, in a wooden shack standing around a fire frying chicken organs, and it was the best Christmas I could have asked for.  I felt at home.