The month of December is typically the time of year when the world reflects on the past achievements and milestones of the waning year while setting aspirations for the following one. During this time of festivities, millions engage in Christmas, Hanukkah and other adjacent traditions.
For others, however, the holiday season can mean more than the expected candy canes, snowmen and visits from Santa Claus. Take for example the tradition of Las Posadas. Stemming from the Catholic faith, Las Posadas is a long-standing tradition in which participants lead a musical procession, commonly celebrated in Mexico, Central America and various parts of the United States with a substantial Latino population. Mimicking the Christian Nativity, participants sing songs written from the point of view of Joseph and Mary as they too go door to door, “requesting shelter” so that Mary may eventually give birth to Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
“The tradition of Las Posadas offers people a more spiritual way to celebrate Christmas and the birth of Christ as opposed to some of the more commercialized ways, not that there’s anything wrong with that either,” says Nancy Dorighi of the Saint Joseph Parish at Fremont’s historic Mission San Jose.
The Mission San Jose/St. Joseph congregation have made it a yearly tradition to organize a roughly 90-minute procession as participants carry candles and statuettes of Joseph, Mary, Jesus and other key figures of the Christian Nativity.
“At the very start of the procession we have someone hold a statue of the Nativity and then we typically read off a two-minute script essentially asking for shelter for the about-to-be-born Christ before moving on to the next property,” adds Dorighi. “We’ve been doing this every year, rain-or-shine [since the Mission’s restoration in 1982] and with social media we’ve been able to share and boost engagement.”
Even for those who are not part of the Christian faith, or any faith for that matter, another local congregation has worked to ensure that the holiday spirit can reach all who want it. Originally founded in 1962, the Tri-City Interfaith Council was established by Protestants in the greater Fremont, Newark and Union City area as means to bring together people of all faiths and creeds. In the decades that followed, the Tri-City Interfaith Council has assembled a following composed of —but not limited to— Christians, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Sikhs, atheists and members of the Baháʼí faith.
Each year, the Tri-City Interfaith Council leads a Thanksgiving Prayer Service in which members of various faiths and degrees of religiousness simply give thanks to whichever deity —or lack thereof— they prefer for what they have in life.
“As long as humanity has existed, we have been divided by faiths, dogma and how we choose to worship,” states Tri-City Interfaith Council Secretary Canice McLaughlin. “I believe that God is bigger than not just all of us, but that he’s bigger than what our brains can think of. Our mission is not to convert others or to evangelize, but to be open and to listen to others.”
McLaughlin believes that events such as the Thanksgiving Prayer Service are crucial to bringing people together, especially in a past year that has been marked with intense and ongoing interreligious conflict and division.
“I can say that it breaks our hearts when we see others use religion as an excuse for warfare,” concludes McLaughlin. “It’s up to us as individual human beings to come together so that we can stop wars in the name of religion and stay true to the ‘Golden Rule’ that all faiths follow so that we can achieve peace among all.”
