“At Christmas my heart goes home.”

Home, for me, is Niagara's Escarpment, Moruga, and Mosquito Creek: the salt in the air, the low hush of the sea, and those enormous oil tankers sitting out on the horizon like quiet, patient beasts. As a child I used to watch them and feel something ache inside me: a longing to see the wide world from the deck of one of those ships, to drift beyond Trinidad’s edge and find out what else existed. Columbus saw the Three Sisters Hills in Moruga, on the Columbus Channel, and I wondered what his thoughts were.

But there was one Christmas when my heart didn’t stay anchored on the south coast. It slipped away across the Gulf, pulled by a different kind of tide, and spent itself in Venezuela with my mom.

The custom of getting together to prepare hallacas, or Venezuelan pastelles, is one of the memories I've carried back to Christmases and back into my own kitchen. There was a sacred quality to hands at work, voices rising and falling, soft arguments over seasoning, and the little laughter that happens when people spend enough time together to be genuine. It went beyond food. It was a legacy.

With mountains, plains, snow-capped peaks, the ancient tabletop cliffs of the Gran Sabana, beaches that stretch like a promise, and that enormous lake of Maracaibo with its own weather and legends, Venezuela feels like a whole world pressed up against it. The nation has a way of capturing your imagination even when you're not there.

And yes, today it’s different. Time changes places. People change places. However, I spent the holidays there, and even for a city like Caracas, "the City of Eternal Spring," which is vibrant all year round and restless, Christmas had its own unique charm. The city sits in a valley, high above sea level, and the air carries a coolness that Trinidad never quite teaches you to expect. Nights demanded jackets. Mornings came with mist. Sometimes the temperature dipped into the 40s, and I remember the strange sweetness of it: frosty breath, cold fingers, and noses turning pink under a sharp blue sky.

And always, looming over everything, was El Ávila: that steady, watchful mountain, rising above the city like a guardian. You could reach it by cable car or by a lonely winding path through the forest, famous, they said, for courting couples who needed a place big enough to hold their dreams.

Caracas had music the way Trinidad has music, like a second atmosphere. In December the soundtrack shifted. Friends became parranderos and aguinalderos, moving from house to house with their songs, serenading families in exchange for food and drink. It was a kind of Christmas lime, familiar in spirit even if the words were different: doors opening, laughter spilling out, glasses refilled, the night stitched together by melody.

In Zulia, the parranda shaped a distinct sound, gaita zuliana, now almost the heartbeat of Venezuelan Christmas. The way we always take something, love it, and make it our own is part of Trinidad's unique lineage: aguinaldo into parang, then branching into soca parang and chutney parang. With so many Venezuelans living here these days, I wonder what will happen to the local music scene, whether the old sounds will blend together or if new ones will emerge. Perhaps it depends on how long visitors stay and how welcomed they are.

When it came to hallacas, I learned there isn’t just one kind. They vary by household, by region, and by memory. My mother learned the Maracucha style, with Maracaibo in her hands, in her seasoning, and in the way she folded and tied as if she were closing up a small, precious package. And the hallaca wasn’t alone on the Christmas table. There was pan de jamón, its smell so distinctive you could almost find Christmas with your eyes closed. Panettone was part of Caracas Christmas before it became common in Trinidad. Even our ponche de crème has a history that dates back to the early 1900s in Venezuela, where it was referred to as ponche crema.

Then, on Noche Buena, or Christmas Eve, at midnight in la Misa de Gallo, the Mass of the Cock, everything reached its zenith. After attending church, people came home for a late dinner, gift-opening, neighbour visits, and the comforting company of several sequites during the early hours of the day. The mass's name derives from a custom fable: a cock in the stable was the first to realize what had happened and to sing about the birth, receiving praise before everyone else had fully realized the miracle.

So maybe I should end where I began, with my heart going home. But “home” turns out to be more than one place. It can be the Niagara Escarpment, Moruga or Mosquito Creek, the tankers on the horizon, or the yearning of a child. And it can also be a kitchen crowded with family, hallacas being made, music outside the window, and Caracas air cold enough to make you feel alive.

I can still hear an aguinaldo drifting through it all, “Corre Caballito,” the song Venezuelan mothers sing to their children. And whenever I remember it, I think, "We have more in common than we allow ourselves to admit."

Our politicians should remember that, too.

Season's Greetings to all... Sarge