A favorite song

Newton has a very nice post about her favorite Christmas songs and I’ve been trying to find sound files for both, so far with no results. The reason for the Christmas song search is that Newton was tagged by the Anchoress with a list of 22 (!) questions, one of which was, What is your favorite Christmas song?, and that got Newton started.

Thinking about my favorite Christmas song brings me back to when I was a little kid (before we lived in this house)

The house we lived in before the house in this picture was a small three-bedroom house in a small lot in the middle of Santurce. That area is now taken up by large apartment buildings, but back then the houses had been built very close together and, since only the bedrooms were air-conditioned, you got to hear most everything going on with your neighbors.

When my father sneezed a neighbor would yell “iSALUD!” (“GESUNDHEIT!”).

If you were sitting in our living/dining room, you could hear the neighbors to the left side of the house at dinnertime . Their mealtime clatter of flatware utensils hitting stoneware plates still lives in my memory. The family had three very loud boys (one of which was my age), who were known around the neighborhood as The Three Bears – maybe because of their table manners? – but I’m not sure if the three boys themselves were aware of this. I do know that years later one of The Three Bears and I attended the same university in the continental US and he was in the tennis team. I can’t tell you if his table manners ever improved since I couldn’t be bothered to contact him because we hadn’t kept in touch for 10-12 years, but to this day I’d love to know what kind of stoneware his mother owned. Those plates were made of sturdy stuff.

I can use plates like those.

To the right side of our house lived a middle-aged widower with his very elderly disabled mother. Unlike The Three Bears, they were very quiet. This gentleman was a very cultured, very erudite, very polite person, and his taste in classical music greatly impressed me. You could say that my passion for classical music started at an early age because of three factors: my aunt Vicenta, Bugs Bunny, and our next-door neighbor. He used to play lovely music.

I don’t know if our neighbor was retired or worked from the home, but he was home in the daytime, and in the afternoons you could hear Beethoven or Haydn faintly waft from next door. Our neighbor was too polite to play loud music as he knew that you would hear everything, so the soft music had a quality of mystery.

One good day my father bought a then-state-of-the-art hi-fi record player housed in a beautiful piece of furniture that would look right at home in Lilek’s Institute of Official Cheer. My mother went out and bought herself a nice collection of Liszt and Chopin piano music, golden-oldies big-band music, and a few vinyls by Tito Rodriguez and the like.

My brother and I were forbidden to touch those records.

Now, you don’t know my mother, because if you did I wouldn’t need to explain to you that what my mother says, is law.

To this day, my brother and I, and my sister (who was born a couple of years later when we lived at the house in the photo), have never tried to find the limits of the law.

Since my brother and I couldn’t even get near my mother’s records but we wanted to play music on the stereo, one afternoon my father brought home a stack of old 78s (which were ancient even then) for us to play.

Unfortunately among the 78s there was a horrible song called Con medio peso (With a half-dollar). You can hear a few bars of the accursed song here. The lyrics itemize all the things that a guy bought with his half dollar, and, like Old MacDonald Had a Farm and The Twelve Days of Christmas, it builds up and repeats the ever-enlarging list. He buys a patio, which gives him a fountain; he buys a goat, which gives him a kid; a car, a house, and on and on.

The worst part was that if you hear it once you keep thinking about it all day.

It’s also one of those songs that stay in your mind for a long, long time. I’m even thinking about it as I write this.

My brother loved, and I mean loved, that song. He played that record morning, noon, and night. He played it on weekdays, weekends, and holidays. He played it when he was happy and when he was sad (not that he was sad to begin with). He played it when he was busy and when he was bored. He played it when hungry and when snacking. He played it when it rained outside, and when it was sunny. He played it while he played with toys and while he colored with crayons. He played it every hour of the living day. Given the chance, he’d still be playing it, if you ask me.

And he played it loud. My mother would tell him to lower the volume but as soon as the coast was clear, he would play it loud . . . again.

Since back then we didn’t go to nursery school and we were too young to go to kindergarten, this meant he had enough opportunity to play that thing so many times that even I got sick of it.

One afternoon I couldn’t take it any more so I picked up my dolls and went to the back yard trying to get away from it. The next door neighbor was also outdoors, trimming the poinsettia hedge that divided the two yards. I remember him as being old, thin, bald, and wearing eyeglasses, looking like a Puerto Rican version of I. M. Pei. He took out a handkerchief out his shirt pocket and dried the sweat coming down his forehead, pushed his eyeglasses up his nose, cleared his throat, and in a soft voice politely asked me if I could kindly ask my mother to please not play that song so often.

So I did.

My mother was absolutely mortified to hear that anyone would think that it was she who was playing it.

Con medio peso disappeared, I believe, permanently.

Anyway, among the other records my brother and I could play was Arbolito, arbolito. Gloria Estefan recorded it a few years ago, and you can hear it here.

Here are the lyrics:

Esta noche es noche buena
Vamos al monte, hermanito
A cortar un arbolito
Porque la noche es serena

Los reyes y los pastores
Cantan siguiendo una estrella
Le cantan a jesusito
Hijo de la virgin bella

Arbolito, arbolito
Campanitas te pondre
Quiero que seas bonito
Que al recien nacido te voy a ofrecer

Arbolito, arbolito
Campanitas te pondre
Quiero que seas bonito
Que al recien nacido te voy a ofrecer

Iremos por el camino
Caminito de belen

Iremos porque esta noche
Ha nacido el nino rey

Happy Saint Nicholas Day!
Update: More on St Nick