A Christmas to Remember

You've made this a Christmas to remember
Springtime feelin's in the middle of December
Strangers meet and they willingly surrender
Oh! What a Christmas to remember

Christmas… in my mind the most daunting part of my whole year abroad. I didn´t know what kind of family I was going to have, what kind of traditions they were going to do, what was appropriate for me to get them…really, I didn´t know anything. I am not going to lie to you guys and say that Christmas was by any means easy, it was not. But I think it was an important part of the experience and I got a lot out of it. I grew, learned and discovered, not for the first time during this exchange, that if I force a smile onto my face and make the best out of what I have, I will realize that I have an awful lot.

Two days before Christmas the question came up one evening, if you could have anything for Christmas this year, what would it be. My host mom started out, she said that she would love to spend the day with her mom, who lives 6 hours away in Quito. Then my host sister said that she doesn´t care as long as she could spend it with family, my host brother seconded this announcement. Then it was my turn, my mind was spinning, what would I want. The options were endless, but then it hit me, and this became my moral for the rest of the holiday season, being here, in Ecuador, is the best gift that I could ever have gotten, what I want is to spend it here with my new family and enjoy every minute of it. This was not always easy, but looking back at it, the day after Christmas; it in general was a good day.

I should mention that my family here didn´t really celebrate Christmas at all. They are very strict Evangelical Catholics, and here apparently that means you don´t celebrate Christmas. At first I was very confused by this, but I came to understand that they don’t celebrate that one day because every day is for Christ and every day we need to celebrate him, not just this day of the year. I think another part of it for my host family was the consumerism, even in Ecuador, that seems to consume everybody over Christmas.

My Christmas day stared off a little drab; I was home alone as my family headed off the church. But then I hoped on Skype and got to have a wonderful breakfast conversation with my Dad, Mom, Skye and Sue. After about an hour, at about 11 am their time, they decided they needed to go and get on that present opening so we signed off. Then I got to have a brief 10 min chat with Aunt Susan, Uncle Lee, Alex and Corry. It was wonderful to hear everybody’s voices and made me feel a little closer to home.

When my family came home from church we had a brief lunch and then headed off to buy bags of candies for some relatives my dad had in the nearby country side. These bags of candies are the traditional gift that is given at Christmas to children, particularly as a sort of charity gift to kids who are poor and aren´t going to be getting anything else for Christmas. We bought about 20 bags and headed out into the deep country. After about a 30 minuet winding drive through the mountains we arrived at a house of some relatives of my dad. I had not been expecting what I saw; we ended up in a small mud hut with a fire burning in one corner cooking dinner and over 30 guinea pigs in another corner, undoubtedly waiting to be dinner. We gave them the candies and then proceeded to have about an hour and a half conversation with them about life. They were very interested in me, where I was from, what I was doing here, why I was living with this family, what school I was going to, and would I please speak a little English for them. We chatted about those things, about religion (my dad’s favorite topic), about life in the country and many other things that came up. It was a truly awesome experience for me; I have seen poverty before, when I lived in Tanzania with my family. But this was the first time that I had a personal connection to the people living it, they were my family here, people who my dad cared a lot about, people who cared a lot about me even though they had just met me under an hour ago. They were so grateful for the candies that we walked away from that visit with three large burlap sacks. One was filled with different kinds of flour that they made there in that hour, another was filled with potatoes that were grown on that land, and the third was filled with corn that was handpicked by them. The generosity of Ecuadorians was amazing to me; they gave what they had just because they wanted to say thanks. We headed to a couple more houses for brief visits, but had to be getting home because it was going to be dark soon.

When I got home, I hopped on face book because this was my connection with the world that was celebrating Christmas. I felt like I had been transported to a different world, one with statues about new computers, cars, phones, snuggies and endless other gadgets and toys. I had almost forgotten that this is what Christmas is about in the states, when hear what Christmas is about for my family is helping out relatives who don´t have as much as we do. Now I am not trying to sound full of myself or anything, I know that for the last 16 Christmases that has been me too and that most likely for the next ones as well. But it was just a very different culture.

So Christmas had its ups and downs and I did miss home quite a lot, but I learned a lot and know that a smile and attempts at a good mood can make all the difference.

Livin´ life on the loose.