It’s Christmas Eve day. We are going to make a gingerbread house. It’s become a bit of a tradition over the years. The girls are excited. I brought a kit from Canada. The only tricky thing here, is once you get the house completed, how do you keep the ants, cockroaches, and mice from moving in. The girls took quite sometime completing their masterpiece. We have an invitation from a family here to come over and share tamales, so we will give the house to them.
Paul is feeling a little better today, which is good. Cali didn’t keep her cold. Paul and I went out for lunch and just ate some soup.
If I had to use three words to describe Christmas here, I would say, fireworks, tamales and marshmellows.
The big grocery store here was packed with indigenous people, which is rare. It looked like a mini market. Tonight is the big night of celebration here, tomorrow isn’t recognized much. The Christmas tradtion in these parts seems to be, the family has a meal and everyone opens their presents at midnight. When I say presents,think more modest, low key gifiting, not over the top. Perhaps it is different in the city where there are more affluent people, but here, I think if you get a small gift or two. The grocery store has a small selection of items you would see in our dollar stores, generic barbie type dolls, small trucks, most items for under $3. he whole stocking thing doesn’t exist here.
The Christmas tree tradition is carried out by the gringos in this town. You can buy a small Charlie Brown style tree in the market. They are fake, sparse, rather sad looking. We got one anyway and threw a bunch of lights on it. The girls wanted a tree. Many of the lights here come complete with a little music box that can’t be turned off. Ours was playing, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” Wasn’t long before I had to take a hammer to it. I’m better now.
The market was packed out all day. I saw one stand with plastic dolls, all of them rather caucasian, not a brown tone in the heap.
There are a few traditional foods which are eated for Christmas dinner here. You may be surprised as to what they are. The first is tamales. These are eaten on any special occasion, holildays or birthdays. They are wrapped in long flat green leaves and cooked over an open fire. Others are steamed. Grapes are another popular item. In the market you will see large mountains of red grapes for sale. Usually there isn’t a grape to be found in the market, you would have to buy those in the city. We asked some local friends why grapes are popular and they said because in pictures of Jesus last supper there were grapes on the table, which they often used to make wine. I thought that was an interesting answer. Nothing about the birth, just fastforwarding to the wine making. The other important item is marshmallows. That’s right, marshmallows. There are skids of marshmellows at the store, and every family snaps up a bag when passing. At the market there was a pickup truck full them. Even though some families can’t afford to buy meat for their dinner, they don’t skimp on the mallows. For example, one family was buying hotdogs, grapes, marshmallows, and one small toy.
We got an invitation to go and eat tamales with a family here. We went over at 9pm, which we were told isn’t very late because everyone stays up to do fireworks at midnight. Christmas here sounds more like New Year’s Eve. A quick explanation about the fireworks here. Loud explosions equals happiness. On any holiday people will get up early to set off the big booming fireworks. If you have a birthday people will set off lots of firecrackers at your door. It’s a public display of happiness.
We walked up to the house or our hosts, past the market. There was stall after stall of fireworks, and lots of people waiting in line to buy some, with an occassion bag of marshmallows here and there. We bought a bag of fireworks. Let’s just say there is a different level of comfort with fireworks here than there is at home. Wee little kiddies are playing with all types of fireworks, and the parents, if they are anywhere close, will smile in loving approval. Our girls went off with the other kids to play in the street to set off small explosives. They were much more cautious than their little Guatemalan counterparts.
Meanwhile the adults were sitting at the table. Paul was put at the head of the table and was given his plate first. The tamales I’ve eaten before have been one-fourth the size of this one. These tamales have an entire turkey leg in the centre. Important cultural tip, your appreciation of the cook has everything to do with how you leave your plate. There is no forgiveness granted for picky eaters, like the Madi. We were told that we needed a full proof plan for the two younger girls, who may take a couple of bites and want to opt out of the rest of the tamale. After a bit of discussion with our host person, we came up with a plan that they wouldn’t be around when the food was served. I didn’t realize that was party why we bought a big bag of fireworks, so the younger two would be away from the table when we ate. I was beyond uncomfortably full by the end of my tamale, but I did my duty and did not insult the cook.
There was a little boy sitting next to me who was about two. He dug into the tamale with great gusto and ate almost the entire thing. He was attacking the huge piece of meat in the middle. I resisted my North American urge to debone it and cut his meat into smaller non-chokable chunks, as his parents and grandma were all sitting around him and unphased with his huge mouthfuls of food. The parents here simply aren’t concerned about the same things we are in North America. I think if they visited our culture they would find our parenting hypervigilant about safety, in particular. Very different parenting cultures.
Around the table we had lots of conversation about cultural differences surrounding Christmas. We put the gingerbread house in the middle of the table. They found it difficult to believe that the whole structure was a big cookie, albeit a dry one. Gingerbread is not something they are familiar with, and everyone was a good sport about trying a piece. They had a good time dismantling it with lots of sharp knives…simultaneously. Something we wouldn’t have done with small children in our culture, and yet no one lost a finger. Maybe small children here are simply born with more common sense survival dna and don’t need parental instruction to not burn themselves with fireworks or cut off a finger while chopping at gingerbread house, or being told not to choke on big pieces of festival fowl.
Here they open their gifts at midnight and they wondered why we don’t do that in Canada. Well…that’s a good question. The only we could come up with was the whole Santa thing, which so many North American parents take great delight in perpetuating the myth. You have to give Santa a chance to deliver the gifts so the kids can wake up to full stockings and presents under the tree. All the Guatemaltecos politely agrees this was the stupidest thing they had ever heard. If the parents go through all the trouble and money to buy gifts, why should a fictitious dude get all the credit? The one person joked that obviously Santa forgot about Guatemala, because no gifts ever appear here overnight. It’s true there is absolutely no Santa culture down here. But there also isn’t much of a present culture here either, just not enough money in pockets.
We walked home at around eleven. The market was still open, and would be until after midnight. Everywhere you could smell the long soft pineneedles that the tienda owners put on the floors of their stores and directly outside the open doors. This is also only done on special occasions. One of characteristics I love about Pana is how the stores are all open wide to the streets. When you walk down the street you see into all of these tiny shops.
The Catholic church midnight mass had just begun when we walked by. We stood in the back of the church. Huge swaths of cloth billowed from one side of the church to the other. It was breathtaking. Almost all the people attending were indigenous. So you had all these white and peach coloured balloons of cloth billowing above the sea of black hair, with lots of sparking since the women have their prettiest ribbons woven into their hair. Very festive.
At midnight the entire village errupted in fireworks. Since we live in a valley you can hear the sounds echo repeatedly off the mountains. Everyone was out in the streets. The perfect end to a very different Christmas.