Holidays in Site

This year I spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve in my community and let me tell you what, it was weird. I’m not saying that they are celebrated nearly the same way, or that they burn effigies of people at one of those holidays but…wait… nope that is exactly what I am about to tell you.

Christmas was definitely the more difficult of the two holidays to pass in site. Here Christmas is not celebrated quite as much as it is in the United States, and in fact Christmas Day is mostly just another day but without work and add in casual drinking all day for those that choose to. The real party is Christmas Eve. For Christmas Eve everyone got together and had a nice big party for several hours with dancing and drinking beer and all that. We all stayed up and then at midnight the music stopped, they played a few Christmas songs, and everyone went around shaking hands and saying “Feliz Navidad!” Now you may be thinking that sounds a lot like how you would celebrate New Year’s and well, you’d be right. It was a strange day to be honest and one wherein I missed being able to spend time with the family and just relax, but I was able to call Mom and Dad so talking with them was nice.

Of course one week after Christmas Eve we were ready to celebrate New Year’s Eve. For a description of how my community celebrates New Year’s please read the above paragraph but replace “beer” with “liquor” and replace “Feliz Navidad!” with “Feliz Año Nuevo!” As you probably understand New Year’s was easier than Christmas because it is not really a traditionally family oriented holiday in the states either. I also knew how the party would be going this time so I mostly just stayed home and used the all night electricity we were gifted as a time to play some computer games. It was more fun than attempting to tell everyone that no, in fact I do not want to have your 50/50 mix of Bacardi and backwash. The one thing that was particularly weird about New Year’s was that people worked all that week to create scarecrow effigies of people, and then at midnight they burned them all. Apparently this is supposed to symbolize burning away bad things or bad habits of the past year, but you make them of other people too (like the president) soooooo to me it symbolizes creepy and murder. Hey different land, different traditions. They all seemed into it and no real people were hurt so that was good. Overall the holidays were not a highlight for me personally and nothing to really write home about, but I figure some people back stateside would be curious so I thought I would let you know! To leave out this blog I will give you some nice photos of people that were constructed and burned for the holidays.

 

Gotta have those shades to block the haters

This one's even got a beard!

A humble blue collar effigy

Well that escalated quickly...