¡Feliz Navidad!

This was the song that played on the car radio back in January 1988 when, deathly sick, I was driven by my then-boyfriend to the BWI airport with my mom, who had come to bring me back home. We boarded the plane that would take me back to live permanently in Puerto Rico for the first time since I'd left in 1978, a stint that lasted 13 years until, once more deathly ill, I left the island for Ohio in 2001. A year later, I had the life-saving surgery that gave me this second chance at life.

Thus, this song means a lot to me, not only because it's a Puerto Rican artist singing a happy song about Christmas but because I remember como si fuera ayer my white-knuckled anxiety at traveling in that condition (including the fear that my boyfriend's old car would break down on the BWI parkway on the way to the airport in a dark, chilly winter morning). The car made it to the airport, we made the flight, and the rest, as they say, is history and a much better one, at that.

Back then, the song gave me hope. And it still does so today. ¡Feliz Navidad!