I sit here at home in Parma with a sticky note pressed against the edge of my computer, a frantic list of Christmas gifts scrawled in a hand more hurried than thoughtful. Not gifts for myself, of course, but for the twenty-some names written in habit of both obligation and affection. Here in Italy, however, the weight of such lists feels oddly solitary, and gift-giving doesn’t seem to be such a principle of the season.
Italians, you see, don’t roll like this.
I first admired the Italian Christmas back in 2021, when I spent the holidays with my friend’s family in the south of Italy. It was a simple celebration of land and heritage, an excuse to eat well in good company.
The family home, structured in a typical Southern-Italian way, was considerably more like a genealogical tree than an ordinary house: the grandmother, the matriarch, occupied the ground floor, and the subsequent floors housed her daughters and their respective families. If the home were a Barbie dream house, the onlooker would open it to find the family strewn across the various levels — father and children catnapping around the fireplaces (lit for coziness, not out of necessity); the mothers with the grandmother on the ground floor, making biscotti.
In lieu of garland, the house was decorated in dried oregano, and the windows were left ajar to welcome a breeze perfumed by the sweet scent of zeppole frying in bubbling oil from a nearby sagra.
I remember that this Christmas was both familiar and foreign to me simultaneously. My Christmases growing up had always been characterized by running around in pajamas well past noon, faces caked with stocking chocolate, and the floor decorated with torn wrapping paper and half-built Lego sets. A colorful, loud, consumerist Christmas.
This one felt calmer, perhaps even more festive somehow.
The only gifts given that Christmas in my friend’s home were two olive tree saplings, one for each of the youngest members of the family. No, they didn’t have Lego-littered, wrapping paper-lined floorboards. It was much simpler than that. Just two olive tree saplings, both given and accepted with the warmth of all in attendance.
This memory came to my mind last night when my dear friend in Parma gave me my annual Christmas gift: a jar of honey, extracted from her family’s bee farm. And it made me reminisce on how just one week prior I was gifted two liters of olive oil from another family farm.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m excited for the Christmas waiting for me back in Louisiana, and I can’t wait to dole out my twenty-some gifts. But as I sit here, caught in thought between the manic flurry of lists I’ve reconciled as inherited tradition, and the quiet, meaningful gestures I’ve witnessed in Italy, I wonder: how would it be perceived if my gift-giving was a bit more Italian this year? Gifts that aren’t wrapped in the usual frenzy of paper and ribbon, crossed off of a sticky note, but instead carrying the weight of a season, a family, a place.
Soon, I’ll be packing my suitcases for Louisiana. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll find myself weighing the options: a suitcase stuffed with twenty-some trinkets or one filled with twenty-some jars of olive oil and honey...
