“Dov’è l’albero di Natale? (Where is the Christmas tree?)” I asked my father. It was Christmas Eve in Sora, a small city surrounded by snow-capped mountains 200 kilometers south from my apartment in Viterbo, and I had been planning to sneak my family’s Christmas presents under a big, green pine tree covered with flashing lights and homemade ornaments later that night.
My father apologetically rushed to his bedroom closet and I watched, bewildered, as he rummaged through dress shoes and work tools, looking for my Christmas tree.
“Ecco qua (Here it is),” he announced, brushing the dust off his pants and holding up a small cardboard box. My father delicately took out a miniature plastic tree and placed it on top of the television in the kitchen. He yanked the black cord into a nearby socket and the tips of the fake pine magically flashed bright colors. I forced a smile, and reluctantly placed my carefully wrapped gifts under the cabinet that held the television that held the Christmas tree.
I had been waiting for this night ever since October, when I noticed my mother literally roasting chestnuts over an open fire, preparing our dessert for that night. I imagined my grandfather dressing up as Babbo Natale (Father Christmas) and my entire extended family gathering together to sing Christmas carols and drink eggnog. I would bake sugar cookies in various festive shapes with my two sisters, and we would share a friendly laugh whenever I would spill flour on the floor. My teachers would assign me no homework over the vacation and I would casually speak rapid Italian to everyone I met.
As I stood in front of a small, boxy, white house which would be my new home for the next week, clutching in one hand a plastic bag containing two pairs of clothes and a toothbrush and another bag filled with presents in my other hand, my newly accustomed familiarity with Italian life zoomed away down the adjacent, noisy highway. Memories of my first day with my Italian family overwhelmed me, and I remembered my mother force-feeding me the contents of the refrigerator while my father yelled at me for not knowing the significance of the American flag and not believing in UFOs and aliens and my sisters nervously translating his rapid dialogue. As I piled blankets on the cot set up next to my sisters’ bed, I hoped my introduction into my extended family would be more graceful and silently prepared myself for various scenarios.
On Christmas Eve, my grandmother had prepared a traditional Christmas meal for the family. Most of my Christmas knowledge comes from the annual Christmas musical I was in for five years, The Christmas Revels, so I could only imagine that we would be eating a Christmas goose or a Christmas pig. I was not expecting a plate of rice teeming with steaming seafood, still with their pale red shells, beady eyes, curved tails and some even with spiny legs. But I pretended I was eating chocolate, a survival technique I had learned from Anne Frank’s diary when I was eight, though my sister Sarah still had to hold my hand whenever I encountered a particularly large and lifelike part of my meal.
During dinner, though I was being as Italian as I could possibly be simply by eating and not saying anything stupid and nonsensical with my bland American accent, my mother proudly described to her family all the strange things I do. My aunts and uncles gaped at me as my mother announced all my eccentricities, such as not using a hairdryer, running in the garden without a coat on, waking up at seven in the morning and still catching my 7:20 bus to school, and living in Brooklyn--right next to where the Twin Towers stood.
After dinner, my new cousins distracted me with difficult conversation in an unfamiliar dialect that sounded more like Yiddish than the Italian I had been studying for four months while my parents and sisters snuck out to buy me Christmas presents after discovering that I knew enough to buy presents for them. The next morning, my family picked up the four packages I had placed on the freezing, speckled grey linoleum floor and in return they handed me a large, ostentatious, bright pink felt purse and an Italian espresso maker, already preparing for my impending return back to America. Since moving in, I have given my family other presents, so I knew how they would treat my Christmas presents. On a trip to my garage one day to look inside all my suitcases for my American brother’s missing glasses, I noticed a shelf with all the gifts I had meticulously chosen for their specific needs: slippers scientifically designed for comfort, bilingual Italian-English books, patterned silk headbands and glass rings. There is also a small shelf in my kitchen for the regional wine, cookies, mushrooms and chocolate I pick up for my family during school field trips. I knew my sister Sarah and father would never wear the shirts I bought for them, my sister Erika would never listen to the tango CDs I burned for her or use the thick winter scarf I purchased, and the DVD for my mother would soon be covered in dust from the garage.
But like my Christmas festivity predictions, these too were slightly off. As soon as we returned from Sora, my father unloaded the sparse luggage and copious leftover food crammed in the trunk and immediately sat down on the couch to watch my mother’s Christmas present with me. My mother, who is usually soft spoken and tiptoes around me with only the occasional bout of confidence and sarcastic humor, seemed only vaguely interested in her Christmas gift and left my father and I in the living room to enjoy the present that wasn’t ours while she did the laundry. I explained Reese’s Pieces and pizza delivery services to my father, and he explained to me how aliens really do exist.
“E.T. telefona casa,” Spielberg’s character robotically begged.
Once the movie was finished, my father made room in the cabinet under the television for the DVD, nestled between a mini-series about the life of Jesus Christ and an educational video about physics. Though I was not pasty and withered like E.T., I called home and excitedly recounted to my American mother what my father had just done, relieved and shocked that I had finally purchased something that my family would actually use. Though I still do strange things, I’m learning to be less of an alien.
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