Happy Holidays, folks! The Christmas season is really upon us now, isn't it? How does Christmas feel away?
It really feels like... nothing.
Every year around this time I do some pondering on the "feeling" of the holidays. You're lucky enough to be able to go back and see what my thoughts were last year, as this blog is officially more than one year old! Anyway, this year I ponder the holidays from a totally new perspective-- the perspective of not participating.
It's so weird. What is so weird about it is that it's not weird at all (if that makes sense). I keep forgetting it's almost Christmas. If I were home, I would be in full-gear preparation mode, buying or making gifts, thinking about what food I am making for the gatherings and how we'll make it to both families's festivities. I would be laboring over lists: what to buy for who, who to invite to a cookie-exchange (I swore last year that I'd have one this year-- goes to show how much life surprises you!), and writing out Christmas cards that would never make it to the mail. These are the things I would be doing today, on the 17th of December (not to mention celebrating my dad's birthday-- HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD) if I were in Rockford right now.
Instead, every once in a while during a day I surprise myself randomly by thinking out of nowhere, "Huh! It's almost Christmas!"
Despite the fact that we are only one week out from The Day, this morning was like any other lately. I awoke in a haze, slightly grumpy after nursing Annika twice in the night and then being awoken by her incessant "MOMMY!" mixed with fuss-cries at 6 in the morning. I groggily dragged my sulky body out of bed as my muscles tried to resurface from the slack slovenness that muscles experience only in the throes of deep sleep and fumbled across the room to haul her heavy body from bed. Feeling like a cigarette (but I don't smoke anymore) I warmed up just ever so slightly to the day by hearing Jeremy downstairs knocking pots and pans around as the smell of coffee (my replacement addicton) wafted upward. However, even after mawing down a Mary's Market vegetable muffin (miss you, Mary's!), toasty papas-- compliments of Jeremy, and slurping on some rich Costa Rican cafe con leche, I found myself irritable and aggrivated.
I washed the dishes (dishes also follow you wherever you may go), swept the fireplace out, started the laundry( laundry follws you wherever you may go) and finally pushed my pasty self out into the sunshine, where I immediately started to feel better. Annika and I tried to call the brown cow to the fence to eat some grass, we walked up and down the long driveway, we wound a grass crown around my head (she wouldn't wear it), and called "PEE-DOE, VENGA PEE-DOE!" (Pinto, come Pinto!). It wasn't until about 10:00 this morning that I thought, while walking barefoot up the driveway, "huh, it's snowing in Rockford-- and it's almost Christmas."
Yes, as you imagine, Costa Ricans celebrate Christmas too, from colored lights and tinsel to Christmas trees and fireworks (every night). Christmas is as much a hullabaloo here as in most places. But as tourists and loners, we are exempt. Without snow, we have no Christmas spirit and the local holiday spirit doesn't really reach us outside the ads at the grocery store or the 25' Coca-Cola Christmas tree just outside San Jose.
So this year we experience an existential version of Christmas and this year I understand that every experience is relative to a person's perspective. A tradition that has been repeated every year for 27 years of my life is suddenly somehow absent and missing (but not missed) at the appointed time.
But it's not completely gone. We are still making plans for Christmas-- just not the typical plans. Without our friends and family, we have a lot of freedom in how we choose to celebrate this year. So we have decided (quite wisely, methinks) to celebrate with some other of our relatives-- squirrel monkies-- on the beaches of the Pacific Ocean just west of here.
I don't think we will do gifts-- although we might do something special for Annika, not sure what yet-- and there most certainly won't be a Christmas tree in our living quarters. But we will wake together as a family Christmas morning and feel warm and cozy. We will have something special in our hearts as we enjoy the holiday and think about all of you at home. We will rub our eyes-- in a happy way this time-- and slip outside to sip refrescas de moras o naranjas on the beach, hiding our postres from the monkeys nearby while the sun spills down on our faces and the ocean water nibbles our toes.
Now that's the Christmas Spirit I like! Stress-free, cheap, and rewarding! Anyone want to join us? I'll book you.
