The holiday season is an excellent time to celebrate all our many blessings, to gather with family and friends and to prepare for a new (and hopefully even better) year. It’s also a great opportunity to carry on family tradition.

Growing up, I wasn’t as connected with my Puerto Rican heritage as I would have liked, but there was still one holiday that we celebrated that helped me feel like an honest-to-goodness Boriqua: Noche Buena.

Noche Buena, which literally translates from Spanish to “good night,” is celebrated in many Latin American cultures Dec. 24. In many households, the holiday is often considered a bigger deal than Christmas itself, though in my hybrid household that wasn’t always the case — I was a big fan of Santa back then.

Steeped in religious tradition, Noche Buena traces its origins to Spanish and Catholic inf luences from the colonization of Latin America. These days, Noche Buena is celebrated with large gatherings of loved ones and a large feast of traditional foods like lechon (roasted pork with crispy skin) and pasteles (a tamale-adjacent dish made with sweet plantains and meat). In Puerto Rican tradition, you can also expect a hearty portion of coquito, a Christmas cocktail made with rum and seasonal spices.

Each Hispanic country — and even the Philippines — has its own traditions and feasts for the holiday, but, by and large, Noche Buena is viewed as an opportunity to wish each other well in the coming year and to celebrate the highs and lows of the previous year.

But it can be difficult to maintain these cultural ties when living in a country in which few actually celebrate the holiday. Even in my mixed family, the tradition became diluted and morphed over the years, and Three Kings Day — a different holiday celebrated later in the year — was left out entirely.

That’s why the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Central Florida hosts some of the area’s biggest celebrations — to make space for the Hispanic population to celebrate their cultures’ end-of-year holidays.

Every year in early January, the Chamber hosts a Latin Festival that combines Noche Buena with Three Kings Day, giving the community an opportunity to come together and share in their cultural traditions.

“We did it this past January, and we had over 10,000 people who came and celebrated with us,” Chamber President Lourdes Leon said.

This annual celebration is free to the public, and offers a wide array of traditional foods from different Latin countries, as well as a hearty dose of music and dancing in true Hispanic fashion. This year will be the Chamber’s 26th time hosting it. The event will take place 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 6, at Dewey O. Boster Sports Complex, 1200 Saxon Blvd. in Deltona.

I know that an event like this would have helped my brother and me better connect to our Puerto Rican roots growing up. We still celebrated Noche Buena with all the Puerto Rican fixings, but definitely lacked that community element that’s so crucial to the holiday.

“It’s very important because it’s part of our culture. And as we move forward with diversity and inclusion, it’s very important to have traditions for the Hispanic population to be able to celebrate proudly year after year,” Leon said. “It’s essential that we bring something like this to the community.”

Even if you can’t make it, there are still many ways to experience Noche Buena in West Volusia. First — and perhaps my favorite part — there’s the food. You can grab a plate of the traditional fixings in DeLand at restaurants such as Chicas Cuban Cafe, Sabor Latino and Rincon Del Sabor. You can also try some of the traditional sweet treats at El Coqui Bakery in Deltona.

You can also catch a midnight Mass at your local Catholic church, as it’s traditionally believed that the actual birth of Jesus occurred on Dec. 24, not the 25th.

No matter how folks choose to celebrate Noche Buena or what traditions they maintain, Leon believes that the most important thing is that the practice gets passed on through the generations.

“I think families think that this is a tradition that they want their kids to remember… you want the traditions to keep going. It’s very important because it’s part of our culture,” Leon said.