Christmas Traditions

So, it's been a month, and really not much work-related has happened. I moved to a new house that I am enjoying, and I had some amazing food in Antigua, thanks to some generous PCV family members, and that is about it. But today I'm going to talk about a really neat tradition that I experienced last night and tonight.

In case you aren't aware, tomorrow is Christmas Eve (really in 45 minutes for me...) and with this time of the year come a number of traditions, lights, trees, chubby men wearing red, the works. Well shockingly, there are other traditions in Guatemalan culture, and the one that I was invited into was kind of wonderful.

For the week before Christmas, every evening around dusk people of Catholic faith do something called "posadas." In a posada, a group of people gather at a predetermined house and then walk to another house. Granted this doesn't sound like much, so I should probably elaborate. The group I was in was made up mostly of women and children, and then of course there was me, standing out a little bit... About one-in-three people had a candle, some of which were in cool little torch-looking, lantern-ish apparati. Then there were four kids holding a chair sort of thing on their shoulders. It was decorated and clearly the important thing that we were taking on the walk (I don't mean for that to sound mocking, I just wasn't paying much attention to what they were carrying because the general activity was so beautiful).

We walked really slowly, and the women who organized the group started singing Christmas carols, at which point the people in the group who knew them joined in. Unfortunately I didn't know any of the words, and only about half of the tunes, so I couldn't contribute much, but it was still really nice. As we walked it turned from day to night (I think it is for this reason that we started at dusk) and the people who had brought along instruments to accompany the singing continued to play them completely randomly, which it turns out works well as long as everyone is being random (I was given a tambourine for a while and felt weird because I could only play it in time with the singers, which sounded strange since the rest of them were just being played whenever).

The first day I did this, I somehow ended up in the front, and had to stop every minute or so to allow the rest of the group to catch up with my giant strides. The second day I was right in the middle, which was better except for the fact that I was then a giant, white man right in the middle of this peaceful procession of short Guatemalan women and children. What I'm trying to say is that I felt out of place. Eventually we ended up at the house that was our destination, and then an interesting ceremony started. Some of the women from the group snuck into the house, but everyone else was stuck outside until some singing started right inside the door. Apparently they were asking the people outside something, because the women right outside sang a response (I didn't understand a word of what was being sung, but I do speak Spanish, I promise!). There were another couple call and responses in song, and then we were allowed inside to have a snack and a hot drink. The family in the house that we ended in was in charge of preparing enough snack for everyone, which was about 50 people. The next night the procession started from the house it had ended in the night before, and went to a different house.

I just thought it was beautiful with the candles and the singing, and demonstrated the generosity of the people here. They wouldn't allow me to leave without having eaten at least two of each type of snack, telling me both that I'm too thin and that it's only fair for my size that I get two. It felt nice to be able to be part of that activity, and it made me feel a little more like part of the community.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year.
--Eric