Christmas in El Salvador was an experience that wasn't as bad or dismal as I had heard it was. Here, they celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve. Basically, the christmas celebration includes first making "special food." Special food included tamales (corn batter cooked with chicken, duck, pork, and sometimes beans wrapped in banana leaves then cooked in a giant black pot for a few hours), panes/sandwiches (gross white bread sandwiches with mayo and meat..no me gustan)and pan dulces (pastries/ sweet bread). I luckily avoided the sandwiches!
On the morning of Christmas eve, I woke up early to go to my friend Mari's house. She owns the "chalet" or little restaurant in my town, and has received some training in baking. She was fortunate enough to save up with help from people to the states to buy an oven. Anyways, so she was en cargado (in charge) of making a pineapple bread/cake called volteado. It is like a layer of caramel, pineapple on top of a bread that tastes sweet kind of like a muffin mix. Anyways, so we spent all morning cooking, cutting fruit and mixing matter. She was in charge of making about 20 of these cakes and mixing the batter so it was smooth was ridiculously hard and tiring. Imagine a bowl that was as big as me making a circle with my arms full of matter that you had to beat with your hands until there were no grains of sugar or lumps of flour. But all the hard work was worth it cause it was delicious.
After cooking all morning, I stopped by the house of the lawyer, Matias in town. He's like 27ish and is great to just have a higher intellectual conversation with. Also, his sister is super sweet and has 3 girls ages 12,7 and 3 that are really cute. So I went there and we talked about our christmas rituals, differences in schooling in El Salvador and the United States, differences between life in the campo and San Salvador, what I possibly want to do in the future and what he wants to do with his practice, and mas. It was good talking to him after cooking all morning and talking about housework and the weather. Well I was there for a good few hours because you just get sucked into staying places and its hard to leave.
When I could break away, I went to my best friend in my site Ana's house. She was still sweeping so we listened to music, danced, sung and did the housework. She made me dinner of scrambled eggs with tomates, beans, cheese and tortillas. Afterwards, we waited for the posada to pass by. The Posada is a statue of Mary and Joseph they carry on wooden beams on the shoulders of 4 boys (think of like how they carried pharoahs on those bed things. They bring the statue into the houses and then a chorus comes in to sing to you. It's kinda like christmas caroling except they are singing about baby jesus and the 3 kings and stuff. After they sing 2 songs they move onto the next house. When they finish going to all the houses, they enter the church and mass starts. I went to mass with Ana and her family. It was nice and I got to see a lot of people and at the end you shake everyone's hand and say feliz navidad y paz (merry Christmas and peace). After the mass, a guy in the band was hanging around with his guitar singing. We went to join him, and we sung christmas carols...feliz navidad and rudolph the rednose raindeer. They sung in Spanish and I in English. We sung feliz navidad a bizlion times because they wanted to learn the English part and also because it was my FIRST song on the guitar that I could play!!! I was happy to try to play, teach them some english and sing with friends.
After our session of christmas carols, the jovenes (youth) in the church had made food baskets for the poorest families in town, and so we went throughout the town giving them out. It was around 11:00pm, which is super late for people to be out, but for Christmas eve everyone tries to stay up until 12pm. When we finished giving out the baskets, I went back to Ana's for a bit and then came home.
CHRISTMAS DAY
Christmas Day arrived! I woke up to go paint my friend, Ruth's wrought-iron doors. Ana Ruth is 17 and is super sweet, loves the environment, animals and is a vegetarian! A salvo vegetarian is really rare. She's awesome and super sweet, but doesn't like painting that much so I helped her. Then we had breakfast of beans, tortillas and a carrot smoothie. Carrot smoothie or liquado doesnt sound that good but trust me they're delicious. After breakfast, I showered and then left to go meet Nicole, the volunteer near me. We walked to meet each other, and then went to another little town called El Pastor to give the Christmas cookies we made a few days before to our friend Chevy who is super helpful and generous. He lived in the states for like 20 years and is a US citizen and very grateful for the opportunities and money he made in the states. While he has an America house...I walked in and was like, "oh hello America!" he is very humble and giving to his community. After our visit, Nicole came up to the pueblo with me to spend Christmas.
We had our little Christmas with christmas music, banana bread that we made, guacamole, hot chocolate (thanks to beth!), some red wine, cuajada (type of cheese) and crackers. I also open up my gifts from Dad and Julie, Beth, and Nana Dee and Ed! Thank you guys! It made my Christmas! Nicole and I both talked with family and friends and just hung out. I definitely missed everyone when I talked to them, and I wish I could have been there celebrating! Hopefully, everyone had a good christmas!
Overall, I'm glad I got to see Christmas from the lives of others...it was less stressful then in the US and kind of like an ordinary day here with some different food. But lacked friends and family from home!
