Sunday, December 24, 2006

Three Kings rule in Puerto Rico

MARY ELLEN BOTTER
The Dallas Morning News

JUANA DIAZ, Puerto Rico -- It's Bethlehem in the New World. The Three Kings seem to be everywhere in Puerto Rico. In art stores. Souvenir shops. On the wall of a bakery. Among gamers in San Juan's Pool Palace. Beside expensive watches in a jeweler's display.

They even have their own museum in this small city five miles northeast of Ponce in southern Puerto Rico.

That isn't to say Christmas itself is trumped by the island's love of the Wise Men reputed to have visited the baby Jesus in the manger. Puerto Ricans are wild about that holiday, celebrating it with joyous abandon, decorating homes, plazas and buildings as early as the beginning of November, and reveling in family gatherings and Christmas Eve church services. Festivities stretch through the second week of January.

For more, go to www.southbendtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061224/Lives01/612240481

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