How We Found the Missing Baby

On Christmas Traditions and How to Write About Them

As we were driving to the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens Holiday Magic Show last Saturday, we passed a church with a lit-up nativity scene. I pointed it out to our boys even though, being 13 and 10, they’re no longer impressed by this sort of thing. Instead of humoring me with displays of mild interest as I’d expected, they were confused. “What’s a nativity?” Santiago, our youngest, asked. Then it was my time to be confused. Was he messing with me? It turns out he wasn’t. William didn’t know either.

I went into storytelling mode and told them all about Mary and Joseph looking for a place for Mary to give birth. Neither my husband Nate nor I could remember the name of the third Wise Man. Melchior, Balthasar, and…? What about the gifts? Frankinncense, Myrrhr, and was it gold? We’re not a religious family, which explains why despite having dozens of Christmas and New Year’s traditions (not an exaggeration), we hadn’t told the boys about the baby and the manger. They, of course, knew about the baby. Just not the tale of his birth.

I felt guilty that we failed to tell them a story that’s crucial to so many cultures and to so many in our culture. Nate, wanting to make me feel better, pointed out that he and I didn’t grow up in religious families either, and yet we knew. Back in the 80s, whether you were in Akron, like Nate, or in Caracas, like me, there was no making it through elementary school without knowing all about Baby Jesus’s birth. We sang songs about it, we reenacted it for school plays, we watched child actors reenact it for school plays on film and TV. At my secular Venezuelan school, I played a shepherd in a few nativity plays. My favorite reenactment featuring Baby Jesus, however, was way more involved and exciting than that.

As we drove to the Botanical Gardens, I told Nate and the boys about the Paradura del Niño, a Venezuelan tradition in which, sometime between January and February, Baby Jesus goes missing. He’s a toddler by now and he has wandered off. Mortified, the Virgin and St. Joseph enlist the whole neighborhood to find him. Although the Paradura is traditionally celebrated in the Andes region, one of my Grandmother Olga’s neighbors brought it to their neighborhood.

Throughout my childhood, that neighbor’s daughter played the Virgin Mary. She had long dark hair and a kind, beautiful face, and she looked radiant in her colorful robes and veil. Whoever her boyfriend was that year would play Joseph, looking dignified in his brown robes. My cousin Yotana, along with our friends Ilse and Diana and I were the angels. Every year, we got cardboard, glue, and glitter and spent a whole day making our wings at Ilse’s house, then paired them with flowy nightgowns.

I’m afraid, it being the 80s, no one took any photos of the paradura. At least no one in my family did. But here I am with my Aunt Rima and Yotana in December of 1999. (Photo by Nathaniel Bowler).

On the big night, the Head Angel (being the youngest, that was never me) led the procession, then came the other angels, followed by the Virgin and Joseph. The Head Angel rang every bell, asking if Baby Jesus was there. The house’s inhabitants would sadly shake their heads, but they’d join us, lighted candle in hand. By the time someone told us they indeed had the baby, there were dozens of neighbors with candles behind us. The Virgin and Joseph would laugh and hug each other in relief, then she’d gently hold the porcelain baby in her arms and gaze upon it with love. After that, we’d have a party at the house of the lady who organized it all. Music, food, and a sense of accomplishment. We’d found the baby, and we’d also found each other. The neighbors felt like our closest friends for the night.

When the Virgin Mary married one of her St. Josephs, tradition called for her to be replaced. At the party after her final paradura, we the angels were invited to audition for the part. One by one we entered a room and walked across it in front of five judges, all of whom were men. Yup, that’s Venezuela in the 1980s for you. Like beauty pageants everywhere, they pretended our ideas might make a difference in who got selected by asking us why we wanted to be the next Virgin.

The judges had a long deliberation, during which we angels waited in an adjacent room, telling each other we didn’t care who won, even though we of course did. Finally—and with much fanfare—my cousin Yotana was crowned the new Virgin Mary in front of all the guests at the party. I was disappointed but not devastated. Being the youngest angel who didn’t even live in the neighborhood, I’d known my chances were slim.

That night, Yotana was glowing. We stayed up long past our bedtime, giggling and imagining the next year’s paradura. A year later, Yotana wasn’t dating anyone, so our friend Diana donned a fake beard and played St. Joseph. I got to be the Head Angel, knocking on doors and asking for the baby. The little ones had grown up. We were running the show, and it was glorious. That night, Yotana and I were both glowing as we stayed up dreaming of the next paradura.

Yotana with my Aunt Rima a few years after being crowned the Virgin Mary.

There was no next paradura, though. I can’t remember why they ended. It was nothing tragic. I think they kind of fizzled, but I’m grateful they lasted as long as they did. Nate and I haven’t given our boys any experiences like the paraduras. The closest would be trick-or-treating, but there’s no big party for neighbors to bond after everyone gets their candy. Still, Nate, the boys, and I love rituals and traditions that mark the passage of time and foster warmth and connection. The trimming of the tree, which we do in early December, is the season’s opening ritual. In this video, I discuss the emotional beats that come with writing a scene about decorating for Christmas while (how meta!) we decorate for Christmas:

Some of the paradura’s magic came from walking alongside others at night as we held tiny sources of light. Not sure why that combination works so well, but it does, which is why Nate, the boys, and I were headed to the Botanical Gardens in the first place. We wanted to traverse a place full of color and wonder together. And yes, it was crowded, but I was as awed by it all as my former angel-self. I have no images of the paradura, but we did record this adventure:

Writers on Writing

I’m starting a new section of “Love in Many Genres” in which I interview writers about their craft and projects. I hope you enjoy these delightful videos featuring Ann Garvin and Jane Friedman.

A How-to Guide for Bluesky

As some of you know, I’m the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space. For our journal’s Substack, I wrote a post that spells out how to use Bluesky and why this new social media platform makes choices that are more helpful to its users than those made by its predecessors. You can check the post out here.

Stories that Transfixed Me (and May Transfix You)

Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days by Jeanette Winterson

This book came out in 2016, when Santiago was a toddler and William a kindergartener. To top it off, I was on the tenure clock, which meant I had to be a publishing machine or I’d lose my job. By the time December rolled around, I was in desperate need of a break while I was also juggling a million deadlines. But Christmas Days was so propulsively beautiful and insightful that it demanded and commanded my attention. There was no putting this book down, and it made me feel full and happy again. It features 12 short stories in different genres. Some magical, some scary. All transcendent. You also get 12 recipes, prefaced by stories about how the recipes ended up in Jeanette Winterson’s life. It’s the perfect way to reflect, dream, and rest during this and any Christmas.

The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife by Anna Johnston

Australian author Anna Johnston loved her kind and generous grandfather so much that when he developed dementia, she got a job at his nursing home so she could have lunch with him and see him every day. That experience inspired this heartwarming novel in which a man named Fred (like her grandfather) ends up being confused with someone named Bernard and inherits his life at a nursing home. While Fred is as decent and loving a man as you’ll ever meet, Bernard was the opposite. As Fred tries to redeem Bernard, he ends up transforming everyone he interacts with while working through the multilayered implications of living someone else’s life. If the holidays are about love, family, and reflecting on our past so we can have a happier future, this book couldn’t be better paired with them.

Your Turn

What are your favorite holiday traditions? What are you reading and watching that resonates with the holidays for you?