The Guadalajara Reporter
Guadalajara's Largest English Newspaper
An unseasonable biting wind brought sleety rains, mornings that put rubbery rims of ice on horse troughs, and harried rural residents of Jalisco’s mountainsides.
A cloudy, chill rain greeted the middle of Mexico’s long-stretch Christmas which began December 8 – the celebration of immaculate conception of “the Virgin Mary, Mother of God” – and continues until Three King’s Day, January 6. Slithering wet clouds gave mountain areas of Jalisco a hue so solemn – and cold – that some folks seemed downcast.
This nation leaves a lackluster economic 2013, stuffed with uncertainty for a new year that the Mexican street views as more of the same.
Late ordering books for friends, relatives living in Mexico? Relax. Christmas in Mexico is a long-haul celebration – as all celebrations should be, despite those guests to the Estados Unidos Mexicanos who complain of “all those damned fireworks” – by which they usually mean cohetes, skyrockets.
History, with the stability one moment of a stone mountain and the next all the buoyancy of quicksand, is presently the target of allegiance by both fervent believers and disbelievers.
Cataclysmic occurrences mark us forever. The assassination of John F. Kennedy for instance. And for considerably older folks, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese December 7, 1941.
On a November morning in the early 1960s, the young girl woke, listening to another of the stinging series of unseasonable mountainside storms. Daily temperatures fell, afternoon and nightly rains increased clasping the scattered adobe homes of the extended Rosales family in their grip. The many-branched clan, along with their herds, flocks, coveys and packs of livestock and poultry, accepted this soaking chill stoically. It was just a natural turn of weather.
