Holidays

How much are holidays tied to a place and culture? Quite a bit. But what happens when an individual with a whole cultural background goes to another culture where they celebrate the same holiday (if at all) in a very different way? This is not a new dilemma for me since I always was between two cultures but within my family entity we created very strong traditions and we sometimes became a tad militant about maintaining (probably because we saw clashes and wanted to maintain a clear cut way that the Stratmeyer family did things)

(school kids performing a Christmas dance)

This year was the first Christmas that I spent away from my family (once for a wedding I arrived a few days late but I was still part of everything). I was a tad apprehensive about the whole scenario and it ended up being wonderful fun days though they didn't feel like Christmas or New Years or Reyes at all.

Here are some of the differences that were very apparent:

Weather

In Costa Rica, December is the first month of summer and is a bit windy. Whenever it felt hot and the wind picked up people would say: 'it feels like Christmas weather' (in Spanish of course =P) As you can imagine not for me. It felt weird to me to see Christmas decorations while sweating buckets. A few volunteers and I decided to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas day together and we choose the coldest location we could find. We were still in short sleeves during the day but in the evening we had to put on light jackets which was very nice.

Food

This is probably the most stark difference. Here the traditional food is tamales: a corn meal base thing with chicken and a few vegetables cooked in banana leaves. To be honest they aren't my favorite but Ticos absolutely love them. I love baking and in my family we all have to make at least one batch of Christmas cookies, but without an oven this makes it a bit complicated. I ended up making some no bake cookies. It didn't feel right not to.

Also, on Christmas day, I talked to people in town who had exactly the same as every other day (rice, beans, meat or arroz con pollo), though a few had chicharrones (pork rind). We made sure to make some delicious pancakes for breakfast and some cookies in the evening on Christmas Day.

Decorations

Ticos do decorate their homes but this was my first Christmas not having my Spain home, with its decorations, to go to. I wanted to decorate but couldn't afford to spend much money on that. I decided to put ornaments on my thanksgiving tree (which I've talked about a lot before) and made egg carton poinsettias. Though I would never win a Christmas decoration award, I was pleased.

New Years Eve

Or Noche Vieja. This is a holiday that I have always celebrated in Spain (as long as I can remember) and I think most of my holiday traditions, if not all, are Spanish: having dinner at 10:30, swallowing 12 grapes as the 12 bells ring in the new year for good luck, lifting your right foot to start the year with the right foot, going out with friends at 2 or 3am, partying until 8am, eating chocolate con churros for breakfast on the 1st. I was in my community for this holiday and my host family invited me to spend the evening with them. We had delicious carne asada and finished eating at 9pm. I have never ever ever had such a hard time getting to midnight for New Years. I talked with my host sister for a few hours and then we started watching a latin music award show on TV for the last hour. I was shocked when I realized that we would have no countdown (we looked on every channel) so we had to with our watches figure out when 2011 expired and 2012 started. After jumping around a tad and congratulating each other, I went to bed by 00:15. :)