Video: Watch Hialeah Haikus’ “12 Days of Miami Christmas”
In 2010, the Miami natives behind the Foryoucansee collective brought you Hialeah Haikus, a patently absurd but hilarious little book full of Miami-in jokes told across sets of three lines. “I hate Abuela/Why she gotta call my girl, ‘La tira-flecha,’” went a memorable classic playing on our city’s arcane racial and ethnic obsessions. “She mani-pedis/At a spare room at her house/Comes out super nice,” went another one about our residents’ common favorite side hustles.
That was then, this is now, and some of the brains behind that operation have scattered across the country. But Miami is the hot, sticky glue that continues to bind ‘em all together, however willingly or not.
So here’s the latest official Hialeah Haikus-branded effort, a quick little video for a song called, unsurprisingly, “The 12 Days of Miami Christmas.” It’s partly promo for the next Hialeah Haikus live event, set for December 22, but mostly a celebration of some of the city’s peculiar Christmas traditions.
“Christmas in Miami is unlike Christmas anywhere else, so we really should have our own songs. I recently tried to explain this to Kim Kardashian in a tweet. I hope she gets it now,” says Alex Hernandez-Fumero, the mastermind behind the song and video. “The scenes of the video, like the haikus, are inside jokes. We were looking for stuff that only Miami people would understand — and also from Google.”
The song — performed by members of the Miami Children’s Chorus! — starts off by pronouncing “Christmas” as a Cuban-accented “Crisma” and gets more ridiculous from there. Yes, there is even a Drake cameo.
The next pop-up Hialeah Haikus event, meanwhile, picks up from where the book left off. If you already own a copy, don’t worry; this is all fresh material. “It’s Christmas-themed, and like a lot of our stuff, it’s probably the one and only time they’ll be read,” says Hernandez-Fumero of the new poems. “It’ll be live and limited-edition Miami nonsense.”
A Very Hialeah (Haikus) Christmas. 8 p.m. Saturday, December 22 at Centro Cultural Espanol Miami, 1490 Biscayne Blvd., Miami. Admission is free. Call 305-448-9677, or visit ccemiami.org/2012/11/a-very-hialeah-haikus-christmas-2/
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