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
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4 comments:
What about Christmas carolling? Dressing up in eleven layers of clothing so that you are warm enough to stand outside in the snow for two hours. Then discovering that you are assigned to a nursing home group and roasting because Oak Glen is always about 74 degrees inside and you can only take off half of your layers.
Hey, what about the weather in Pine Tree, Vermont? It was so warm and sunny there that Bob, Betty, Phil, and Judy wondered if they were in Florida. Maybe singing the song will help (even if Puky is not there to attack you): I'm dreaming of a white Christmas...
Love you,
Andrea
Yeah, I definitely spent a good amount of time reminiscing about Oak Glen and the Chili dinner, not to mention the candle-light service followed by the Bart-and-Lisa-like incessant begging to open just one gift on Christmas Eve. But then I have SO MANY childhood memories of Christmas (someone nudge mom in the ribs for me), I had to pick just a few.
-L
I understand the need to be concise (not that I EVER am good at being concise). I was more trying to say that you do have Christmas memories that, since they involve being swelteringly warm, correlate to your experience this year.
Andrea
Sooo...you're saying that for the next week and a half I should simply pretend that I'm stuck in an over-sized nursing home? That'll bring out my festive side for sure!
-L
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