183. Christmas Here and There

I have never been in Italy for Christmas, but I’ve been there Christmas-adjacent, as they say these days.

In 2008, I was in Rome for the long MLK weekend, when the nativity scene was still up at the Vatican, and I spent New Year’s in Sicily in 2010, where more humble yet much more beautiful nativity scenes, called presepi, were in the churches and in the town squares. It is the tradition of the South that presepi do not simply display the creche, but an extensive scene of village daily life, with peasants and tradespeople and families, all looking suspiciously Italian.

Napoli’s Via San Gregorio Armeno is particularly famous for these, and you can buy your own figures, right from the craftsmen who make them. (I am a sucker for their angels.)

So popular is this street with tourists that in 2022, Naples instituted a system of one-way pedestrian traffic for much of December, in the interest of public safety. It’s not everywhere that one is in danger trying to get a glimpse of a figurine of Baby Jesus, Mary or Joseph, but that’s Naples for you.

More recently, I have been in Italy in November a few times, and had a chance to see the ramp-up to the holiday. My father always said that Christmas was not a big deal in Italy when he was growing up — Easter was the thing — but it seems the American celebration has caught on there, even including Santa and Black Friday, which seems to simply designate pre-Christmas sales, as they have no Thanksgiving Thursday to latch it to.

Italian-Americans do Christmas big time, with the focus on food and lights being in their exact sweet spot, and there is no place more festive than the old Italian neighborhood of South Philadelphia. In the days before the holiday, the Italian Market shops are a madhouse of customers from all over, with lines going around the block.

South Philadelphia’s Thirteenth Street has several blocks of lights and other displays, as residents outdo themselves and each other to decorate for the thousands of spectators who come every year.

When I started working at Swarthmore College in 1996, I heard some of the native-Philadelphian Italian-Americans talking about the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Seemingly, this stems from the old Catholic rule that you couldn’t eat meat on Christmas Eve as a sacrifice, but you can count on the Italians to make this custom into an incredible gastronomical experience, while staying technically legal. Even though I grew up spending Christmas with my mother’s extended Italian-American family in Chicago, and had a father who was actually Italian, this was a tradition with which I was not familiar. But I decided to try it, and we have made it our own. Every year, my family works together to make a feast involving at least seven types of seafood, inviting over dear friends who are the closest thing we have to family within a 100-mile radius. We don’t make the traditional eel or the fried smelts, but I insist on baccala, or dried salt cod, that is hard to find here, but widely available in many varieties in Italy.

Here’s hoping that your holidays — whatever, however, and with whomever you celebrate — are filled with love, fun, and a little baccala.