Lets start by saying that most of what we’ve heard from foreigners about Christmas in Honduras is that it sucks. Not the same feeling, not the same spirit. Still, Max and I were really excited to spend the season with our friends here and get to know how they spend it.
It all started in early November with the firecrackers. You see, firecrackers are the definition of Christmas for Honduran boys. In the US, any kid thinks of presents, lights, and pine trees when they think of Christmas. In Honduras, it is firecrackers and they want to extend the joy as much as possible. If you know Max well you’ll understand how he felt every time a string of firecrackers was lit by our neighborhood boys in our front gate. I found myself cursing on multiple occasions after being scared to death by the automatic rifle I thought I just heard and realizing it was… you guessed… firecrackers. Oh, they joy of the season!!
After spending a wonderful and wet Thanksgiving with the Wilsons, Max and I went on a mission: to find a decent Christmas tree. This was important to us since we were going to be away from our families, we wanted to replicate our own traditions in our current home. You can’t find real Christmas trees here, but we had seen plenty of artificial ones for sale in the stores. We first visited the obvious stores where we’d seen them for sale; the local department store, the local varieties store, the grocery store. We were surprised to see that in early December a lot of the trees had been sold already. We couldn’t find a tree we liked. Panic started to set in (I speak for myself since you might already know that Max is not the panicking type). What are we going to do? We might have to cut down a tree and put it in our living room! Of course that wouldn’t have been appropriate given that Max works with a forestry organization. But SHIT, this was Christmas; we can’t not have a Christmas tree. Around the same time our garden got invaded with leaf cutting ants and they were cutting it away. We thought those ants were really cool, until they started messing with our garden. We were forced to put our tree mission on hold for another one; to find a way to kill the little bastards. Our innocent little selves would have never expected what happened next: the hardware store had both an organic ant killer and decent artificial Christmas trees! The organic ant killer didn’t really work, but the tree will always remain an important part of the memories of our Christmas on the Peace Corps.
Next we had to find lights. There were plenty of lights everywhere, but Max remembered seeing a set of shimmering lights for sale at the grocery store a few weeks before. He has memories of shimmering lights in the trees of his childhood, before they were dimmed too unsafe for sale in the states. He really wanted those. Of course they didn’t have them anymore. Again we had to go from store to store, looking for the lights. I had no memories of shimmering lights from my childhood and couldn’t have cared less, but I put on my best artificial smile and followed him through dusty alleys and busy streets narrowly escaping cars hitting me on my bike until we found shimmering lights. In the end they were in another grocery store and they looked beautiful on our tree. We were both happy.
Other than the lights, the tree had a bunch of cheap plastic Christmas balls for ornaments and an origami Santa that Max made. No big angel or star or bow on top, no fancy cloth or re-creation of the nativity scene on bottom. It was beautiful and I spent a good number of hours this month staring at the white shimmering lights (If you hear Max say I was mostly under the influence of alcohol during those moments, it’s a lie!). We got a lot of compliments from our friends on the tree.
In mid-December people started taking vacation and having a lot of spare time. Christmas was in the air. The women were making Tamales (indispensable in any Honduran Christmas meal), the men playing and watching soccer, and the kids lighting firecrackers. This is when the eating started. Every organization we support or are related to in any way (including the gym I go to) has a Christmas dinner that we were invited to. We even participated in a cuchumbo (gift exchange) with our co-workers at the vocational school. If you know Max you know how much he enjoyed that. I’m still trying to get him to wear the bright yellow guayavera (many-pocketed shirt) he received in the exchange.
During our Christmas in Honduras, we also got to see the best fireworks show ever. Our good friends Carlos and Samara came over to make cookies, listen to music, and have a few drinks. Then Carlos remembered that the university where he works was sponsoring a fireworks show. In good Honduran fashion he didn’t know what time the show started, neither did any of the friends and co-workers he called to ask. We decided to head there at 7:30pm, it sounded like the kind of time you’d do a show of the such. When we arrived, there weren’t a lot of people at the university but a few were already expectantly standing in the parking lot. At one end of the lot we saw the mortars and knew that’s where the fireworks would be shot from. We stood as close as possible, about 25 meters away. A small fire truck came in to supervise the show and parked between us and the mortars to a side, two firemen where standing by. Slowly more people started arriving, and the show began. We were so close to the action that the noise was deafening. The fireworks were being shot so close to us that the burning cinders were falling on us and everyone around us. The guys next to us moved their car to keep the ashes from coming in their open windows. About 5 minutes into the show one mortar fell over and the shell shot straight towards us instead of up. I ran and hid behind Max so it wouldn’t hit me in the leg (I did feel guilty when I realized I was using Max as a shield to not get burned). Carlos our friend swears the thing went between his legs. I think I saw that too. Some of the fireworks were defective and wouldn’t get enough altitude; they would explode low enough to illicit screams from the crowd instead of oohs and ahhs. I was in shock and awe, so much so that I must have been keeping my mouth slightly open while I was looking up at the show, because some ash or pieces of paper fell in it. As a souvenir from that night I took home a piece of shell that fell next to us.
The rest of the days leading up to Christmas were filled with friends, my Puerto Rican Christmas music that I played everywhere, and food (including the cookies we made that turned out to be a LOT). We got to hear a lot of live music in the local bars and even stayed up until sunrise a couple of times at one of our favorite bars by the beach. Oh, and shopping. We bought presents for our friend Chela and her five boys and for each other.
Christmas eve we went to our friend Gilda’s house for lunch. Her entire family was there, including her husband and kids, and their cousin from the states with her husband and mother. The food was abundant and the conversation animated. Mostly the men joking how they don’t get fed as well everyday of the year. Judging by their bellies I’d say they’re wrong. In the evening we headed to our friends Mike and Carolina’s for dinner. Mike is an RPCV (returned Peace Corps volunteer) that married Honduran Carolina and stayed. Carolina’s mom cooked a wonderful traditional Christmas meal, including pork leg and torrejas (like French toast boiled in syrup and condensed milk). That meal was some of the best we’ve had in Honduras. It is tradition here for everybody to wait up till midnight on the 24th and light a bunch of firecrackers to celebrate the arrival of Christmas day, just like we do on New Years. Another tradition is that people wear new clothes for Christmas Day or estreno. Most of the shopping going on the weeks before was for clothes and not necessarily toys. Everyone looked really nice in their new outfits. Another common tradition is for people to spend Christmas Eve in church until midnight (evangelicals) or go to church at 5:00am on Christmas Day (Catholics).
On Christmas day I cooked a big turkey and arroz con gandules (Puerto Rican style) and we invited our friends Chela with her five boys, Mike and Carolina with their boy Liam, our friends from Denmark Andre and Trina with their beautiful daughter Frida and our next door neighbors Alejandra and Modesto with their two kids. We all sat together in a long table for lunch and enjoyed each other’s company. The kids got high on Coca Cola and candy and had a great time with their new toys. You should have seen how filthy our floor was after everyone left.
New Years was a lot more about parties, drinking and, well, still about firecrackers. We started the party on the 29th and ended on the 2nd. Most of it is a big blur in my mind. I’ll just limit myself to say it was the wildest New Years Max and I have ever had. Not a bad way to start 2007.
All and all we had a wonderful time, not a single second of it sucked. We learned about Honduran Christmas that there is generally a lot more emphasis on the spirituality of the occasion than in the US, that everybody needs new clothes and a pork leg to celebrate it properly, and that in the end it’s all about sharing some happy moments with the people you care about. Not too shabby.
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