'Tis the season to be jolly...

But I'm having a hard time getting into that Christmas spirit. No, I'm not being a depressing party-pooper. I'm still happily participating in the festivities without raining on anyone's parade. But Christmas in summer is just weird. How can Christmas be Christmas if you spend the day at the beach, like my host family often does? I just can't get over the irony of the fact that the stores are filled with snowman decorations and the radio plays songs like "Walking in a Winter Wonderland", while here it's summer, and it never snows even during the winter. I'm sure those of you from warm places wouldn't be so deeply bothered by this, but to me it just seems wrong.


It's not just the weather that makes Christmas here different. Because we don't have Thanksgiving, there isn't an official start to the Christmas season; it's more of a gradual transition. My host family put the Christmas tree up early last week, and the house is all decorated. Christmas music is often playing in the house, and though I don't know any of the words in Spanish, I sing along in English. What's interesting is that none of the words or titles of the songs are exact translations. "Silent Night" is translated "Night of Peace", for example. This should have been obvious, since lyrics need to fit the notes and rhythm of the music and a literal translation usually can't do that, but I never considered that until last weekend, when we were sitting around after dinner comparing favorite Christmas songs, and I managed to confuse the whole family every time I mentioned one. I thought they just didn't know most of my favorites, until I started singing bits of them, and then they said, "oh, it's not called "Oh pueblito de Belén" (Oh little town of Bethlehem), it's: (insert Spanish title which I can't remember right now). So my task for the next couple weeks (in addition to my 2 exams, 2 essays and 2 group projects) is to learn the words to at least a couple songs so I can sing along in the proper language.

Other interesting cultural notes about Christmas:

In most of the country, it's illegal to cut down Christmas trees, so everyone has fake ones. Chilean pines are much more rare than their American counterparts, and they were starting to go extinct because too many people cut them down for Christmas, hence the law. It's another difference that probably wouldn't seem strange for many of you, but after growing up surrounded by Christmas tree farms, plastic pines seem almost sacreligious.

The words "Navidad" and "Pascua" seem to be interchangeable here, even though pascua means Easter. Santa Claus is occasionally called Santa Claus, but usually "El Viejito de Pascua" (the little old man of Christmas).

Not all Chilean churches have services on Christmas eve or Christmas day. The church I attend celebrates it the Sunday before Christmas, but apparently this depends on the church.

Chileans never say "Happy Holidays" because in this semi-officially Catholic country, where the only sizeable religious minority is non-Catholic Christians, there is no other holiday. I don't know how the few Chileans of other religions feel about this since I don't know any of them, but being sensitive to religious differences is not really something anyone worries about here. And when all schools, public and private, have religion classes which teach mainly Christianity, the whole separation of church and state in public education thing is not an issue.

I'm sorry I haven't posted any pictures lately, but I promise that the next post will have lots.

Happy thanksgiving!