A Different Kind of Christmas

Christmas means a lot of things for me. It means freshly baked springerlies that make the whole house smell like anise. It means upside-down Christmas trees and ugly ornament contests, a ring of nutcrackers that guard the paper angel I colored when I was 2-years old. It means cuddling up on the couch to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “White Christmas,” then cuddling up with my mom in bed to read all of our favorite childhood Christmas stories. It means overflowing Christmas stockings, lounging around all day in pjs, and eating clam chowder and shrimp cocktails. It means candlelight Church services and listening to the Handel’s “Messiah” until my father can’t stand it any longer. This is how I define Christmas, and this year it all changed.

This year I had to spend Christmas in Peru.

I remember the moment when it dawned on my parents and me that I wouldn’t be able to spend the holidays at home. It was before I left, and we were all standing in the kitchen. I had just read the rule in my Peace Corps handbook that stated that no volunteer was allowed to travel or receive foreign guests during their first six months in country. We did the math – I was to arrive in mid-September, which meant I would only have phone and Skype-contact with my family until February.

“But…but what about Christmas?” my mom asked.

We were all stunned. “Well,” I said rather shell-shocked, “I guess Christmas is going to be a little different this year.” 

Although I tried to act excited and praised the idea of experiencing Christmas in a foreign country, deep down I was worried. What if Christmas turned out to be a total dud? What if my host family didn’t do anything for the holidays? What if my only Christmas celebration turned out to be nothing more than me sitting all alone on my bed, binging on packaged cookies and chocolate bars? It was a terrifying prospect.

As the days of December passed by, I started to get more and more anxious. I finally felt at home in Aurahua and felt close to my host family, but still the idea of celebrating Christmas away from my American family seemed rather troubling. I shrugged and smiled when I cheerfully told my neighbors that I’d be sticking around for the holidays. However, I’m sure my eyes revealed my inner panic. The responses I received were all pretty much the same: “You’re going to be here for Christmas? Oh you poor thing! They don’t do anything here for the holidays. You should have gone back to the States.” Thanks guys, thanks a lot. I kept probing my host family, subtly asking what, exactly, we’d be doing on the 24^th and the 25^th and crossing my fingers that it would be something more than watching soap operas on TV. The answers were vague and mysterious. Apparently all of my host siblings were coming back home for the holidays, but other than that I got nothing.

Well, at least I wouldn’t suffer alone.

One by one they arrived at the house. My 18-year old host brother, Maiker, arrived first, followed shortly by my older 25-year old brother, Robinson, and my younger host sister, Yessenea, who is 20-years old. Erica, who is 23, was the last to arrive. All together, we went from a quiet, peaceful household of five to a jam-packed house of nine. It couldn’t have been better.

I soon discovered that I loved – repeat LOVED – my host siblings. We did everything together. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, I was with at least one of them. We spent hours laughing, talking, comparing childhoods and Christmas traditions, and everything in between. Robinson gave me a half-day tour of the neighboring countryside, pointing out all of our family-owned fields and the areas where he used to play and beat up on his brothers as a child. When we got home, he started giving me cooking lessons. Lacking a Christmas tree, Yessenea commandeered me into decorating the family store with red, green, and yellow balloons. Let me tell you, blowing up balloons is easier said than done in high altitude. There were also fierce volleyball matches and men vs. women soccer games between me, Yessenea, and my two younger brothers Mayson and Rubven. As I spent more and more time with them, I realized how irregular it was for them all to be home at once. Robinson had a full-time job in Lima, Yessenea was a university student, Maiker attended a college-preparatory academy, and Erica worked for the government in Chincha. They all had busy, hectic lives, making trips home hard to schedule. Robinson, for his part, hadn’t been home for Christmas in about ten years. The more and more I learned, the more I realized that they had all made a special effort to not only return home for the holidays, but also to meet and welcome me.

A lot of my best memories leading up to Christmas have to deal with food. Besides my regular cooking lessons, there was a lot of activity in the kitchen. Since the family had grown considerably, we had a lot more cooking to do. Right before Christmas Eve, one of our cows suffered from colic and had to be killed. As Robinson and I prepared food for our dogs (by the way, we have FOUR puppies) and made cheese, I watched as my dad, our farmhands, and my three other host brothers skinned and quartered the carcass. We carried everything back home, and every, and I mean every, available overhanging surface was used to hang the meat. We had ribs hanging off clotheslines, hearts and lungs draped over gutters, legs and cutlets dangling off of pipes, and, to top of it, a cow head staring rather morosely from an oil drum barrel. Our back yard looked like a murder scene from the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”  But boy did we eat well. Meat is rather expensive here, and most times an animal is more valuable alive than slaughtered. Typically dishes have only small pieces of meat, but for the holidays we had whole slabs of seasoned beef and rich, meaty stews. As all nine of us piled into our small earthen kitchen, we laughed and joked and ate heartily. “Isn’t it great that we’re all finally together as one big family?” asked my host sister, Yessenea, “And now we have another daughter in the family! What could be better for Christmas?”

When Christmas Eve arrived, I had two celebrations to prepare for: one with the health center and one with my family. Unfortunately for my health staff, medical emergencies don’t respect the holidays. Since anything could happen at any time, someone had to stay in the health center for Christmas. Unfortunately that rather unpleasant duty fell on our nurse intern, Miriam, and two of our technicians, Elizabeth and Carmen Luz. Knowing firsthand how much it truly sucked to be away from home during the holidays, I proposed that we have our own Christmas celebration together. The idea became very popular, and we commissioned Carmen to make us some sort of Christmas dinner. Elizabeth, Miriam and I bought all the groceries and, in lieu of my normal holiday baking, I made no-bake cookies. At 8:00 on Christmas Eve, we gathered around one of our tables in the health center, feasted on chicken boiled in dark beer with peas and carrots, fried potatoes, rice, boxed wine, sickeningly sweet champagne, and cookies and jammed out to Latin music videos. Before we left, we went over to the center’s nativity set and put baby Jesus in his manger.

My second Christmas Eve celebration was with my host family. After leaving the health center, I found all of my host siblings in the street throwing small fireworks and playing volleyball. I gladly joined them and was pleased to win the volleyball game (although this was mostly due to my younger host brother, Rubvin). We were then ushered inside to have a late-night feast of pachamanca.

Pachamanca is one of the best foods Peru has to offer. It’s a traditional dish usually consisting of seasoned meat, sweet potatoes, yellow potatoes, peas, and choclo, a type of large-kernelled corn, that are slowly roasted together. There are two ways you can cook pachamanca. You can either burry all the ingredients in the ground with some hot coals, or you can slowly cook everything together in a big pot over a fire. People normally are fanatic about their method of cooking. Those who prefer the earthen method state that the flavors are richer than anything you could get from an iron pot. On the other hand, those who use pots say that the meat is far more tender and not nearly as dry as cooking pachamanca in the ground. In either case, the result is delicious.

After having our fill of pachamanca, we waited until the stroke of midnight and had a chocolatada. Chocolatadadas are events that consist of only two things: hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon and clove and panetón. Once I felt like I was ready to explode, we had a dance party. Yessenea turned out to be quite the dancing dictator and demanded that everyone get up and party. She put in DVD after DVD of Andean music videos and we all celebrated. I danced wino, a type of Andean dance. It’s a little hard to describe, but it consists mostly of hopping, twirling, and stomping. Although I never say it out loud, I always refer to wino dancing in my head as “kill the herd of cockroaches” dance, or “trample out the forest fire” dance. My friend Karen affectionately refers to it as “stomp your right foot till you drop” dance. At 1:00 AM, I was about ready to drop. I thanked everyone, excused myself, and merrily passed out on my bed.

As I drifted off to sleep I couldn’t help but think how lucky I was. It was true that I was away from home and didn’t really get to do any of my traditional Christmas celebrations. I didn’t get to make my springerlies, or have my holiday movie marathon, or even decorate my tree, but that didn’t mean I didn’t get to have Christmas. I got to celebrate a warm, family-filled holiday and the birth of Christ with people I had truly come to love. So, it was a different kind of Christmas, but a wonderful Christmas all the same.