USA TODAY International Edition
Three Kings Day could be businesses’ ‘ second Christmas’
Fernando Laspina won’t let the pandemic deter him from celebrating Three Kings Day, known to many Latinos as a second Christmas.
Laspina runs El Maestro, a nonprofit educational center in the Bronx, New York, where he plans to safely garner enough gifts for children from low- income families in the area.
Every year, members of the South Bronx consider extra spending for the Jan. 6 celebration to gift their families and El Maestro.
“It’s not our typical Three Kings Day celebration this year,” Laspina said. “We were close to canceling it, but it’s important to keep the tradition alive.” The Puerto Rican organization will organize a socially distanced gift distribution for children, who will receive toys from the Three Kings.
Latino children across the USA celebrate Three Kings Day, which commemorates the “Wise Men” visiting the Nativity scene, according to Christian tradition. For parents, this means extra holiday shopping throughout the winter season, there are few store offers to take advantage of after Christmas.
“This is a lost opportunity for businesses in the U. S., especially in places with a huge presence of Latinos,” said Monica García- Pérez, an economics professor at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.
“It’s a period that dies after Christmas, and it would be good for online businesses to target younger audiences between Christmas and the first week of January.”
Venezuela, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, Paraguay and Cuba are among the countries that celebrate this tradition. Each country commemorates the Wise Men visit in different ways, as
well as differs in gifts. In Venezuela, gifts range from small toys to candy, while in Puerto Rico and Mexico, gifts tend to be larger and pricier.
The U. S. Hispanic population reached a record 60.6 million in 2019, up 930,000 over the previous year, according to the Pew Research Center.
From 2010 to 2019, the Latino share of the U. S. population increased from 16% to 18%, and they accounted for nearly half of all U. S. population growth over this period.
Latino buying power has risen from $ 213 billion in 1990 to $ 1.5 trillion in 2018, according to a Nielsen report in 2019. This number is likely to rise to $ 1.9 trillion in 2023.
Despite this growth, García- Pérez said she’s worried the gifts in Hispanic households could diminish this year.
“The Hispanic community has been very financially hit by COVID, so it’s likely Hispanics made up their mind about their budgets for Three Kings Day,” García- Pérez said.
Seventy- two percent of Latino households reported money problems amid COVID- 19, compared with onethird of white households, according to a polling series released in September by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.
Laspina said the pandemic has battered the community, but he hopes El Maestro will be able to keep traditions alive in the new year.
“Anyone who doesn’t have the time to buy gifts can always make monetary donations, but we always make sure to buy enough gifts so each child can have one – it’s better to have leftover than not enough,” Laspina said.
El Maestro expects more than 100 children to arrive throughout the day in the socially distanced activity.