This year, it will be the first in four years that I am spending christmas in a place where there is actually snow. Since I am 15, I’ve been escaping the winter and managing to spend the christmas holidays with my dad in Peru. In the next few lines, I just wanted to share my ‘christmas’ experience in Peru, a country were 99% of the population has never seen snow.
Many things struck me as odd the first time I went there. Everything felt strange and unfamiliar mainly because we were, and I remember this clearly, December 20th and there was no snow. When I arrived to Peru, I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a jacket for the plane’s airconditioning. Little did I know that the heat after mid-december quickly escalates to the high 20′s. Jeans were obviously not the right choice. Going back to the first thing that struck me as odd. As I was ridding down the avenue from the airport in the front passenger seat of my dad’s front car, I remember seing the weirdest thing… There were light posts that had been decorated with the hanging figures of no other than a traditional snowman. My first reaction was one of laughter obviously. As I explained to my dad the absurdity of having a decoration which no one in the country would ever feel, touch, or even experience the wonderfull feeling of making a snowman, he explained something that made me rethink the holidays in Peru.
What he basically argued, in a very serious manner, was that first of all, few people cared about the decoration. Peruvians decore their streets much more than here. There is no issue of laicism because it is a christian country and hence anyone can decorate as much as they want. Artificial christmas trees at least 10 metres tall were seen anywhere there was space for them. What my father explained to me was that Christmas in Peru was still very much about familly gathering. It had little to do with snow, santa clauss, raindeers, or any other elements that we often use to lighten up our holidays. The contrast was an interesting one…while in Canada it is common sense that we decorate our streets and houses because every decoration brings back to an idea, a concept, an experience that we relate too and that usually brings us happiness. In Peru, the joy was in seeing people, in spending time together. Decorations were in fact nothing more than accesories used for their aesthetic value and not because they reminded peruvians of anything.
As a last anecdote I want to include, I wanted to mention that in Peru, one of the most popular Christmas songs starts with the following line : Oh, blanca navidad, suegnos, I con la nieve alrededor… (on the rythm of ‘oh, quand j’entends chanter, noel, je vois revoir mes joix d’enfants…’). This song, which is heard on the radio and known by anybody, translates into ‘Oh, white christmas, dreams, and with the snow all around… To be honest, I have lived in this country, I was born there, I go there twice a year on average and I still cannot make sense of how and why did that song make it into the classics of Christmas time.
Can anyone else relate to differences in the ways people live the holidays? What are the holidays like in your country?
Your remarks about Christmas decorations and snow remind me of Chimamanda Adichie’s discussion about growing up in Nigeria reading British children’s books, and how she started writing stories where there was snow, and people talked about the weather and ate apples, even though those things were entirely beyond her experience. It sounds like the Americanization of Christmas had arrived in Peru in the shape of snowman decorations! I find your father’s analysis very interesting.
By: danabath on December 17, 2009
at 4:58 pm