.......and still more memories of Christmas of...

In Cuba where I was born, a day or two before King's Day, the sidewalks along the main street of our hometown were lined with vendors who would set up their temporary booths and tables and sell homemade toys and other crafts.

Puppets and spinning tops, dolls and dollhouses, pull toys and balls of every size and color! Looking back in retrospect, some of these were quite cheaply made but it was wonderful to walk up and down the streets, hoarding your saved up allowance money in your pocket and see, admire, touch and hopefully be able to finally make a selection and buy some of these things to give as gifts to your brothers and sisters and little playmates.

There were also many street vendors calling out their offerings as they traveled the neighborhoods. Some pushing carts with colorful fruits and vegetales. Others would announce their fresh fish or live chickens for sale. Their songs would blend with each other as they walked the streets. At this particular time of year you could also find the ‘gofio man’ plying his wares. Gofio is something I have never seen in the States. It is finely ground toasted corn meal to which the vendor added sugar. It was then poured into tightly rolled white paper cones with the top folded so the gofio could not spill. The vendor had a special container in which he stored the filled cones to keep them warm. We kids loved to buy a cone for mere pennies and it was fun to tilt our heads back and pour the contents into our mouths……….of course, sometimes the dryness of the gofio powder would make you choke, but that was part of the fun!

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The best Christmas gift ever! My twin brothers and I with my dollhouse. I was almost 5 years old.

I remember the beautiful dollhouse my parents had a carpenter friend build for me for my 5th Christmas!!! It had "real" lights, was two stories tall and opened on the sides where you could see all the rooms on either side and move the furniture around to re-decorate at will.
My cousin's wife was a teacher at one of the manual arts schools
(sort of a finishing school for young ladies) and she had had her
students make rugs and curtains, pillows and bedspreads as a class project. Being the days before you could find the hundreds of miniature furniture as you now can, my parents made most of the furniture using pieces of wood and found objects. All except the "parlor" set, which was made of handpainted porcelain!

My dollhouse even had its own gallery of five ‘family portraits’ along the walls of the stairway. My mom had taken photographs of each of us and cut them to fit small frames she had made and gilded. In those days the photos were all in sepia. I can still remember how proud I was to have them hanging on the walls of my own dollhouse just like our own home had a gallery of our family’s portraits.

After that year, the dollhouse would also be displayed sitting on a skirted table in the living room, all lit up and near our Christmas tree, showing it’s very own tiny Christmas tree for all the passersby to admire.