Photos by Xill Fessenden.

Jungle Bells

A loud peal of thunder awakened me at precisely 5 A.M. this morning of Christmas Eve, 2025. I have been in this little house formed entirely of concrete for the past three weeks. I am 78 years old and this is the third time in my life that I’ve celebrated Christmas without a tree, decorations or presents. I am in the small jungle town of Buenavista, Quintana Roo. Streets are dirt roads carved through the jungle by the tires of the vehicles that use them––bicycles, motorcycles, three-wheeled bicycles and a very occasional car or truck. Deep potholes fill with water during the periodical heavy jungle rains. Dogs serve as topes, slowing down all traffic by lying in the exact center of the dirt pathways..moving only by shifting their head back to hover over their back haunches so that you can avoid them, barely, by moving one wheel out over the edge of the dirt track onto the vegetation that hugs the road closely. After three weeks here, we still get lost, even maneuvering to places we’ve been to dozens of times. With no street markers, directions are limited to distinctive houses, stores..or more often, recognized dogs in the center of the road.

I am traveling with my friend Xill, and today we woke up late and assembled a large shopping bag full of presents for the family whose life we have witnessed by ear from the other side of the wall that separates their dirt-floored home from our concrete one.  The baby and dogs have shared their voices the most often, and the dogs have met us each time we open our gates to leave or to return.  They are Bambi and Rocky–friendly and accustomed to a treat each time they see us.  For them we have brought a bag of dogfood embellished with tinsel. Each of the three daughters will receive a bracelet of semiprecious local stone. The two-year-old a huge transport vehicle filled with various cars and trucks, the two-month old a snuggly soft blanket with matching stuffed hippo, the Mom and Dad two houseplants and a big Christmas box of Ferro-Rocher chocolates. In addition, a spinning top and Christmas stocking full of small toys and candy. I think that is it. Later we will take them tamales made by the mother of our favorite small grocery-store owner.

I think they don’t quite know how to respond to us.  Early in our visit, when musicians and men settling off fireworks in celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe came by their house to share music and beer, when I stuck my nose in to see what the hoopla was, they invited me in to see a small boy dancing with one of the men to the music. They offered us beers, which I took even though I don’t drink beer, and we offered them 200 pesos to contribute to their costs. And so, although our intercourse has been limited, I feel tied to this little family that I have heard nightly over the wall that separates us. The baby’s cries, as noted before, and sounds of merriment from the girls long after I would think they would have gone to bed.

I miss the kids I usually give a pinata party for on Xmas, an Easter Egg hunt for Easter.  These children are my substitutes, letting me feel some vestige of Christmas spirit even though we have celebrated it so oddly. Everything is everywhere, I have often said, and so it is with Christmas, even when we substitute tamales for turkey, fireworks for Christmas music, a dip in a cold lake for snowball fights. I look back to a Christmas in India, another in Africa, another in Australia. In each, different traditions, new people, even changes in the date when Christmas was celebrated, and the one thing they all had in common was how they prompted memories––the same memories mentioned by my sister in her response to my photos of how I’d spent the day. Family Christmases with a mother who had taught us all to appreciate the traditions of tree, decorations, family, presents and memory–of all of the special happenings that can be shared and remembered for however long nature chooses to give us to remember them.