Signs that it’s Christmas in Guatemala:
1. The assembly of a giant musical Christmas tree in Sololá,
complete with the famous Gallo beer logo atop the star.
2. The overnight appearance of a metal frame tree in your
town center. The frame is soon
filled with individual fir tree clippings, which are then spray-painted teal
and draped with red and gold ribbons.
I think it may have been easier to just use a full tree, but Guatever.
3. An inexplicably threatening poster of the town mayor hung
at the base of the town tree. I
think he’s wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, but he may be threatening broken
kneecaps; it’s not entirely clear.
4. A second threatening photo of the mayor, this time with
his full posse in tow.
5. A proliferation of those horrible singing Christmas
lights that play tinny renditions of 2-3 Christmas classics on repeat. Seriously, they even have these
bedecking the Virgin Mary statue in church, and keep them playing through Mass.
6. The arrival in site of a new group of volunteers. It’s great to see some friendly, albeit
unfamiliar, gringo faces for the holidays, and to accompany them on a tour of
the lake, reveling in the Guatemalan landscape and scoping out local real
estate.
7. An abundance of fluffy white snow. Oh, wait, actually, it’s 70 degrees
here.
8. Posadas.
Meant as a reenactment of all the inn rejections Mary and Joseph
experienced, posadas are nightly neighborhood gatherings at different houses. A band plays, everyone kneels and prays
for about two hours, and snacks are served. It’s quite a to-do.
For the posada at my house, my host dad hung the garage with curtains,
painted a desert landscape on the back wall, and erected a huge tree and
dwarf-size nativity scene. I took
the afternoon off work to help my host family prepare, and, along with four
other women, spent three hours chopping fruit to feed the coming guests. Said guests filled the garage and the
driveway, overflowing into the street.
9. All the tamales!
All the ponche! These two
Guatemalan delicacies comprise literally all the Christmas cuisine
here—everyone serves them, and no one serves anything else. The tamales consist of corn meal filled
with peppers, raisins, and unidentifiable meat (possibly beef?), all stuffed in
banana leaves and boiled until cooked through. Ponche is a Guatemalan twist on fruit punch: a pell-mell
mixture of any and all available tropical fruits (papaya, pineapple, plantains,
coconut, etc.) dumped into a veritable cauldron of water and boiled until
syrupy. I foolishly thought this was
a healthy Guatemalan treat, until I saw my host mom dump four pounds of sugar
into her ponche pot. I wish I was
exaggerating.
10. Too.
Many. Firecrackers. “Bombas” are a popular Guatemalan
entertainment year-round, but the locals really scale up their efforts for the
yuletide. It’s practically
impossible to walk down the street without experiencing an auditory
assault. The grand finale comes on
Christmas Eve night: everyone waits up till midnight with their families, then
sets off hundreds of Quetzales’ worth of firecrackers.
And so, at 12:30 Christmas morning, I found myself in my
host family’s driveway, clutching a mug of ponche and shivering against the
night breeze. I watched in horror
as my host dad instructed Isaias to aim his firework gun directly for the power
lines hanging about six feet above his head, while my host mom pelted the two
of them with lit bombas (the whole fireworks safety thing hasn’t really caught
on in Guatemala. It’s quite common
to see people missing eyes or ears or cheeks or fingers, and it’s a safe bet
that said body parts were lost to incendiary devices). Luckily, my host family and I escaped
unscathed.
Forty-five minutes earlier, I had timidly presented my host
family with their Christmas gifts:
- A can of American chili for my host dad (he is obsessed with American chili, and once told me this story of how he made chili without a stove, by wrapping beans and meat in a plastic sheet and hanging the assembly in his hot shower for three hours. He swears it was delicious)
- Fancypants American body butter for my host mom to rub on her burgeoning stomach (I am actually concerned she is going to explode, a la John Hurt in Alien)
- Dodgy bootleg DVDs for my host brother, including Monsters University and the Muppet Movie (it’s a little weird to gift such obviously black market material to a seven-year-old, but bootleg DVDs are the only available DVDs here, and I figured he could benefit from a little Tina Fey in his life)
My host family hadn’t gotten me anything, but I consoled
myself with the beautiful purse gifted me by my CAP family, and with the recent Christmas care package lovingly shipped from Minnesota. Say what you will; good tampons and New
Yorkers make a positively heartwarming Christmas gift.
After the gift-giving hugging time, the heartstopping
fireworks celebration, and some weepy prayers in the garage (Guatemalans are
big on crying while praying, and I was feeling pretty homesick), my host family
and I headed next door (my host aunt’s house) for tamales and ponche. I ate my way around the mystery meat in
my tamale, and, to the delight of my hostess, drank a full two mugs of steaming
ponche. The Guatemalans, in a
truly welcoming fashion, wanted to hear all about Minnesota. I was happy to oblige, although
blabbing about snow and Christmas in the U.S. didn’t really help the whole
homesickness thing.
We all crawled into bed around 3:00, then got up at 6:30 to
go to Christmas Mass. Seeing how
the churches here are overflowing every Sunday, I fully expected the Christmas
service to be mobbed. But there
was hardly anyone there! My host
parents explained that most people are just too tired from tamale-making and
firecracker-exploding to venture out on Christmas morning. So, instead of a hymn-heavy,
candle-filled Christmas Mass like the ones I used to attend in grade school, I
was treated to an intimate acoustic show, with the priest strumming Silent
Night and Feliz Navidad on his guitar.
I quite liked it.
The post-firecracker lethargy didn’t end with Mass; it
apparently lasts all Christmas Day.
I spent the day wandering my town, chatting on the phone with other
Peace Corps Volunteers, and jaunting to Sololá to find a pineapple (I had a
craving, ok?). I hardly saw
anyone, and returned home to a quiet dinner of Velveeta mac ‘n’ cheese (a great
splurge), half a pineapple, and peanut butter M&Ms—in other words, my own
little Guatemalan feast.
Now, before ending this post, I have to tell you about my Christmas
present from Guatemala, as promised.
Around Thanksgiving, I was contacted by the Coordinator for the Sololá
Área de Salud (the Health District, essentially). He wants me, along with two other nearby Peace Corps
Volunteers, to plan and lead a year-long training for the district’s health
educators. We’ll be teaching them
about how adults learn, how to use the experiential learning cycle to plan
lessons, and how to make do with available resources to give interactive and
useful lessons. Right now,
community health lessons are usually given by reading off a sheet of paper, so
there’s a lot of room for improvement.
I’m pretty excited, mostly because I think the training could make a big
difference, but also just because it’s something to do! I’ll keep you posted.
Wishing you a very Merry Christmas, whether you have snow or
not. I leave you with this photo
of a fairly adorable puppy, found by another volunteer and transported by yours
truly to its new home (with a friend’s host family).
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