It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

X-mas has arrived in Haiti.

Merchants along the smoggy, congested main route in Port-au-Prince, Rue Delmas, are decked-out (get it?). Christmas lights. Christmas trees. Tinsel. Red and green flashing reindeer. Life-sized dancing Santas. Not to mention the special christmas deals offered by the two cellphone companies, Digicel and Voila. And all of this started appearing mid-November.

Despite the familiar commercialization, it feels more like our summer family vacations to Santa Clause World in smoldering southern Indiana than the two weeks before Christmas. Nothing makes a person realize the categorical boxes into which she has organized the world more than living in a different culture.

Christmas is cold. Christmas is peppermint flavored hot cocoa. It's shivering under the brown blanket in the back of the car to hunt christmas light displays after Andrea and I had played at our piano recitals. And it's baking christmas cookies to warm the house as much as to eat the cookies. Though we often didn't have snow on Christmas day, it was nearly as exciting to go to bed hoping for a fresh cover of snow as it was dreaming of the battery-operated pink Barbie motorcycle I had asked for.

But not in Haiti.

Last week, I went swimming in the ocean at night. (Granted, it really was too cold for that.) Sunday, Rebecca and I baked christmas cookies wearing shorts and short-sleeved shirts.

All of this -- the commercial displays and my lack of festivity -- is a good reminder that I don't need to "feel" like it's Christmas. Still, I am a tiny bit jealous of mom and dad's ice-storm...

-L