Raise your hand if you didn’t want to flee to the Caribbean before a Christmas Eve dinner. It is not for less. The pressure for peace and harmony to reign in the family gathering is combined with the weight of absences, and the emotional burden that all this entails ends up making even the most balanced person stagger. That reality, however, is usually hidden under the rugs in pursuit of a picture of the encounter that overflows with joy. Something similar happens with the literature of the genre. Dickens’s shadow is too long. That’s why ‘A Christmas Like This’ (Tusquets) is so refreshing, an anthology of stories by Spanish authors that challenges the traditional narratives associated with this season. Food, traditions, geography, family, emotions… Nothing escapes this peculiar deconstruction that has been coordinated by Elisa Ferrer and in which Cristina Araújo Gámir, Julia Viejo, Andrea Fernández Plata, Munir Hachemi, Paco Cerdá, Inés Martín have participated Rodrigo, Marta Jiménez Serrano and Daniel Ruiz. Each of them took Christmas as a starting point to explore universal, complex and emotional themes. From irony to fantasy, through humor and social criticism. Because between ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and ‘The Grinch’ there is a wide range of nuances. Standard Related News No Charles Dickens returns to the scene for Christmas The very popular story by the British author ‘A Christmas Carol’ is presented starring Mariano Peña and Antonia San JuanThe Anglo-Saxon imaginary is dealt with by Inés Martín Rodrigo, who moves from New York, the world epicenter of these festivities with its ice rinks and New Year’s Eve in Times Square, to a suffocating Las Vegas in ‘The first year-round Christmas store in Sin City’. “What Elisa asked us was to decontextualize Christmas, remove it from the clichés of snow, lights and kindness, and take it to a completely different place,” explained the author during the presentation of the book. Inspired by a trip to Sausalito, where she discovered a Christmas store open in the middle of summer (“imagine not being able to get rid of the props all year round, with everyone’s desire to take down the tree when the holidays are over”) , Inés constructed the story of a character whose relationship with Christmas is as ambivalent as her own: “It is a time of year that awakens very extreme emotions.” Family ties tighten more than ever at Christmas and there are several stories that have them as protagonists, although for very different reasons. Marta Jiménez Serrano unravels the dynamics that underlie the brilliance of the meetings in ‘The Worst Christmases’. “I thought the only thing I had to do was put a magnifying glass on any normal family at that time and all the shit that’s under all the Christmas dinners would come out,” he says. The protagonist’s parents are going to separate and the Three Kings and Santa Claus are coming for the first time, but the avalanche of gifts does not prevent the impact of the divorce. Irony and subversion You also don’t have to get to that point to experience the holidays that Jiménez Serrano reflects: “We pretend that everything is going perfectly, we put the nougats the same, we put the champagne the same, we put the whole dinner the same, even if it’s not Christmas to be so happy.” ». Of course, the story ends in El Corte Inglés “with that feeling that you are very hot because you are dressed very warmly.” The shopping center is also the setting for ‘Home and Decoration’, by Cristina Araújo Gámir, which, with a tragicomic and heartbreaking touch, addresses the story of a daughter who wants to escape from her mother. From north to south, Spanish traditions cross the pages of ‘A Christmas Like This’. Julia Viejo and Marta Jiménez Serrano focus their stories around food, not only as a cultural element, but as an emotional catalyst. ‘The offering’ addresses the lack of resources when everything is articulated around the table. “It is the contrast between the daily diet of poor people and how they add the rest when Christmas comes so that they do not lack anything,” emphasizes its author, Andrea Fernández Plata. In ‘The miracle of the peladillas’, Julia Viejo explores the sweet traditions of yesteryear through the epistolary relationships between a prisoner and his beloved. The most subversive Christmas spirit underlies the story by Daniel Ruiz, ‘Green wind, green branch’ . Set in a southern context, the story reinterprets tradition with an irreverent approach that mixes gypsies who steal copper, extraterrestrial apparitions and civil guards, creating an atmosphere as fun as it is surreal. «I wanted to have a mischief, a party. It’s a Christmas that I have very often. That thing about going out in the morning on the 24th and starting to receive unwanted calls at eight in the afternoon because you haven’t arrived yet, and when you sit down to dinner with the family your mouth is a skein of wool.” All the clichés are present and absent. at the same time in ‘A Christmas Like This’. It doesn’t snow here, but the essence of these festivities filters through the cracks of everyday life, because, as Elisa Ferrer points out in her prologue, “a Miguelito de la Roda can taste like a Proust madeleine.”
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