Blue Christmas

This week has been hard. Hard because I still have a cold that keeps me coughing and phlemy the minute I stop taking the meds the doctor gave me on Monday. Hard because the tail of yet another hurricane is whipping across the north coast and it’s raining non-stop again. Hard because I don’t understand what’s going on at the SANAA office though I keep trying to advance the one water project I’m working on. Hard because Hernán and I are not getting along and so I don’t feel comfortable working at the Biblioteca Digital this week (dating coworkers is not always the best idea). But most of all, hard because this is the first year that I am not with my family during the holidays. I haven’t lived at my parents’ house for over 10 years, but I have always made it home for Christmas. My family isn’t big and we never throw a huge party or go on vacation somewhere exotic together. We don’t drink or go dancing together. Nor do we cook elegant food or give each other expensive gifts. But we are always together, eating the same pumpkin pie that my dad makes from the can and making snide remarks at the monstrous Christmas lights that our neighbors hang on their houses. We always go to the same 9 pm church service and sing the same Christmas carols. My brother and I always fight over who has to distribute the gifts from underneath the Christmas tree. My father always gives my mother one of those fruitcakes that has a disturbing resemblance to a brick in both shape and weight (and in taste, I would say). My mom always gives me used books she buys for a dollar at the second-hand bookstore, and gives my father economy packs of 75-watt lightbulbs and double-D batteries.

This year everything seems wrong knowing that I won’t have that. Other than “Feliz Navidad,” no one is playing Christmas songs and all I still hear is reggaeton blasting from every stereo in town. I see the Christmas trees in other family’s houses and they aren’t decorated like my family’s tree. Nobody else has electric candles in their front windows like the ones that greet me the first night I come home for the holidays every December. And of course, it’s not cold. Even though it’s raining, the low has been about 65 degrees.

But if I don’t have family here, I do have a few good friends. I went to Sandra’s house on Tuesday afternoon just to say hi, and ended up staying through dinner and then getting invited to go over to a family friend’s house afterwards. What I had been told was just a visit to eat some cake turned out to be a full-on quinceañera (15th birthday) party, complete with several dozen guests, bocadillos (appetizers) accompanying a 10 pm dinner of Mexican tacos, a piñata and dozen teenagers schizophrenically flipping through their paltry ripped-CD collection in a night-long attempt to find a song that everyone wanted to dance to. Just as we were about to leave a little before 1 am, Sandra’s older brother and party-invigorator Will (who studies in San Pedro Sula but is in town for the holidays) showed up and we all proceeded to dance for yet another hour. I didn’t get home until almost 2 am. And that was just the beginning of the week.

Wednesday night I went to Ceiba with my sitemate Lauren to hang out on her last night in Honduras in 2005 since she’s vacationing with her family for the holidays. We went to the mall to see the Harry Potter movie, ate at the Pizza Hut next to the hotel and stayed up until 1 am watching Conan O’Brien despite a brief city-wide power outage, during which we took a break to have a nightcap at the hotel bar. (Even wanna-be hippies miss American pop culture.) I saw her off to the airport early the next morning and headed back to Olanchito. That afternoon, Sandra’s family invited me over to make nacatamales, a traditional Christmas food in much of Latin America. I didn’t get there until early evening, but Sandra, her mother Doña Sandra, her grandmother Doña Lola and our French friend Stephanie had been at it since mid-afternoon, stirring two different types of cornmeal masa nonstop for hours so they wouldn’t burn, boiling pieces of pork on the bone and spicing ground beef and rice to stuff inside the cornmeal, and cleaning the banana leaves used to wrap the tamales so they can be boiled. I was put to work cleaning a second mountain of banana leaves. That one task was long and tedious enough that by the time it was my turn to start wrapping the tamales, I had no patience left and made more complaints than actual tamales. But at some point we stopped wrapping and started eating, and boy are tamales good. I laughed inside, remembering that a certain Colombian told me last Christmas that nacatamales are a latino’s favorite holiday food to eat and their least favorite to make.

This afternoon Stephanie invited me to go with her and her best Honduran friend Paula to see the most Christmas-y house in Olanchito. We waited until nightfall, and then Paula drove us along with her son, twin toddlers and nephew to see the house with the most impressive display of lights in town. The entire yard and house were indeed lit up with the typical flashing, singing, blinking lights and horrid inflatable snowmen and Mary and Jesus figures I have seen in the States. More interesting was a small town, rather like the kind that toy railroad fans arrange, set up on an elevated platform under an extended eave of the house. What I didn’t expect was the inside of the house. An entire wall of the living room was set up with small porcelain Christmas figurines. Another high-ceilinged room was filled with shelves of life-like moving Christmas dolls and stuffed animals. Every corner of the four rooms of the house that we saw (which were obviously only used for the decorations because there was absolutely no space remaining to do anything but look) was occupied by yet another poinsettia-embroidered pillow or holly-wreath rug. All the rooms combined had no less than three different Christmas trees, all decorated differently. The sheer number of trite ornaments and decorations somehow cancelled out their individual cheesiness factors and converted the entire assemblage into a veritable Christmas museum. Not surprising was learning that the owner of the house has two children living in the States. I have heard that dollars sent from the U.S. are the biggest single form of income for Hondurans, and I am beginning to believe it.

After being overwhelmed by the house of tchotchkes, we returned to Paula’s house to make an eggnog drink and headed to another party at around 9 pm, this time to see Paula’s niece Tonia. Once again I didn’t realize that we were going to a big family birthday party until we got to Tonia’s house, where a dozen women were belting out ranchera ballads to the tune of a computerized karaoke program and another two dozen young and old family members were running (younger) or milling (older) around the house, popping ballons (younger) or smoking cigarettes and cracking jokes (older). Tonia’s mother and ex-vice mayor Doña Ester immediately served us each an enormous plate of pork ribs and birthday cake with a sandy, too-sweet icing, neither of which I could stomach. Before long we were in front of the computer with the others, pretending to sing along to the ranchera music before Stephanie and I co-opted the karaoke program and started playing U2 and Bob Marley songs. It was only OK because Tonia knew all the songs we chose and could sing along with us in English, too. We ended the night at 1 am dancing along to the video of Guns ‘N Roses’ “Paradise City.”

Returning home tonight, I feel a lot better about being away from my family this Christmas. Before Honduras, I had never considered bad birthday cake and bad karaoke to be blessings. But somehow right here, tonight, they are.