First of all, no. No, I can’t tell you what they are saying here. At least not for the most part. I do hear them say “ninos” quite a bit, which I know means “children.” So I think they are saying something about how much fun this is for the children, or how nice it is to see the children, or something like that. They are also talking about the Posadas, of course. These are the nightly processions that re-enact the journey of Mary and Joseph from their home in Nazareth to the little town of Bethlehem.
Now I have read that there is no historical evidence to support this story. Caesar never did censuses, at least not in the way described. Who cares? I don’t. There is more than one way to get at the truth. The truth is that there will be times in all of our lives when we will be wandering, lost, without shelter, and having done something stupid like dragged our hugely pregnant wife out into the middle of the desert. Bad idea.
A “posada” is an inn. As you can probably surmise, the processions lead to place, often homes, that symbolize the inn at which Joseph and Mary arrived. The problem is getting in the door. Tonight, I stood shivering with a group accompanying our Maria y Jose outside the doors of the Cathedral of All Souls. It was fun, until it quit being fun and we wanted to be let in already. About that time, they opened the doors and we all sang together. We sang songs about coming home and about Nochebuenas, the Christmas Eve flower (known to us as Poinsettias.)
It feels good to come in from the cold. It feels even better to be welcomed in by singing and laughter. The people who welcomed me inside probably do not always get the same kind of welcome. They get stopped on the way home from work because someone thinks they are “illegal.” They, in turn, exchange la paz del Señor with me. I’m like the Joseph kid with a beard painted on, grinning like an idiot and loving every minute.