When a 25-year-old guitarist named Jos\u00e9 Montserrate Feliciano Garc\u00eda, from the historic Puerto Rican town of Lares (birthplace of the country\u2019s 19th century movement for independence from Spain)\u00a0recorded\u00a0an album of Christmas music released by RCA Victor Latino\u00a0in 1970, he did a number of things.<\/p>\n
First, thanks mainly to the extremely simple but catchy title track, \u201cFeliz Navidad,\u201d he vaulted to worldwide fame as a recording artist.<\/p>\n
Second, in the public perception of his artistry, he became trapped by that success: most music fans are unaware of Feliciano\u2019s breathtaking mastery as a virtuoso of the guitar (much as pop singing success obscured the vast musical talents of artists like Nat Cole and George Benson).<\/p>\n
And third and most importantly in this season, young Jos\u00e9 Feliciano made the Christmas greeting \u2018Feliz Navidad\u2019 one of the small handful of Spanish phrases that virtually every English speaker\u2014not to mention speakers of other languages around the world\u2014knows.<\/p>\n
But\u00a0Feliz\u00a0Navidad<\/em>\u00a0is not the only greeting widely exchanged in the Spanish-speaking world at this time of year.\u00a0 The more ecumenical\u00a0Felices Fiestas<\/em>\u00a0(Happy Holidays) is also commonplace.\u00a0 This may come as a surprise to some who see\u2014and lament\u2014in \u2018Happy Holidays\u2019 a bland securalization that they imagine to be a recent departure from a more comfortably dominant Christian culture in the United States, and who might assume\u00a0that\u00a0Hispanic\/Latin American culture has not experienced a similar trend.<\/p>\n In truth,\u00a0Felices Fiestas\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Feliz Navidad\u00a0<\/em>were more or less equivalent in popularity for roughly the first half of the 20th century, with the more overtly religious greeting actually becoming much more widely used since roughly 1970 or 1975.\u00a0 At least, this is the picture that emerges from\u00a0the literature that Google has scanned and gathered into the remarkable corpus accessible through the Ngram Viewer. In this diagram,\u00a0Feliz Navidad\u00a0<\/em>is in blue and green, andFelices Fiestas<\/em>\u00a0in red and yellow.<\/p>\n The phrase\u00a0Felices Fiestas<\/em>\u00a0(Happy Holidays) is not even necessarily secular.\u00a0 After all, the root of Engl. \u2018holidays\u2019 is \u2018holy days\u2019, and Span.\u00a0fiestas<\/em>\u00a0can refer to religious observances too.\u00a0For example, a 19th century religious polemic by the Spanish cleric Valent\u00edn Ma\u00f1osa y Arboix,\u00a0Nuevo triunfo de la verdad cat\u00f3lica<\/em>\u00a0[The New Triumph of Catholic Truth], proposes the following greeting to be used with fellow Christians one believes to be theologically in error:<\/p>\n \u201cDeseo a V. y compa\u00f1eros felices fiestas, y que el divino Jes\u00fas con su luz eterna disipe las tinieblas del error en que, por desgracia, est\u00e1n Vds. envueltos.\u201d [I wish you and your colleagues happy holidays, and that the divine Jesus with his eternal light may dispel the darkness of error by which, unfortunately, all of you are surrounded.]<\/em><\/p>\n Though it must have been satisfying to compose,\u00a0Father Valent\u00edn\u2019s formula has, somehow,\u00a0not quite caught on as a popular holiday greeting.<\/p>\n In addition to\u00a0Navidad<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0las Navidades<\/em>, Spanish has another way of referring to Christmas, namely\u00a0las Pascuas de Navidad.\u00a0<\/em>The word\u00a0pascua\u00a0<\/em>is most familiar, and most commonly used, for Easter.\u00a0 It derives, through Latinpascha\u00a0<\/em>and Greek \u03c0\u1f71\u03c3\u03c7\u03b1,\u00a0ultimately from the Hebrew\u00a0pesach<\/em>\u00a0(Passover).<\/p>\n But\u00a0pascua<\/em>\u00a0has an additional\u00a0meaning, registered this way by\u00a0the\u00a0Diccionario de la Real Academia Espa\u00f1ola\u00a0<\/em>[Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy]: \u201cCada una de las solemnidades del nacimiento de Cristo, del reconocimiento y adoraci\u00f3n de los Reyes Magos y de la venida del Esp\u00edritu Santo sobre el Colegio Apost\u00f3lico\u201d (Each of the ecclesiastical festivities of the birth of Christ, His recognition and adoration by the Magi, and the coming of the Holy Spirit over the Apostles.\u201d)\u00a0 In a word: Christmastide.<\/p>\n So,\u00a0Felices Pascuas de Navidad<\/em>, or\u00a0Felices Pascuas<\/em>\u00a0for short,\u00a0 is another greeting of the season, particularly widespread in Spain.<\/p>\n Of course, expressing\u00a0\u2019Merry Christmas,\u2019 \u2018Happy Holidays,\u2019 or \u2018Season\u2019s Greetings\u2019 in Spanish as\u00a0Feliz Navidad, Felices Fiestas,<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Felices Pascuas de Navidad<\/em>\u00a0is only part of the broad act of cultural translation that this season brings. The imagery of snow, while more and more a wistful memory in parts of the U.S., is downright fantastic in most of Latin America.\u00a0 There, the reality of Christmastime is summer, swimming trunks, and fireworks\u2014in Lima or Buenos Aires, the Christmas Eve night sky is like a Stateside Fourth of July.<\/p>\n There are other cultural subtleties, as well.\u00a0\u00a0Pap\u00e1 Noel<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Santa Claus\u00a0<\/em>(sometimes spelled\u00a0Santa Clos<\/em>) rival one another for the name of the Polar deliverer of gifts.\u00a0 Gifts are generally opened at, or just after, midnight, as opposed to Christmas morning most typical in the U.S. More significantly, the traditional procession of\u00a0\u00a0Las Posadas,\u00a0<\/em>whose observance is now limited mainly to Mexico and parts of Central America, reenacts Mary and Joseph\u2019s search for lodging.<\/p>\n