A very different Christmas season

It's strange being here during the Christmas season. For one thing there's the weather. It went from being bright and sunny in the morning and gloomy and rainy every afternoon to suddenly very bitterly cold and sometimes overcast in the mornings and usually clear, sunny and even hot in the afternoons, and chilly again as soon as the sun sets (I don't think I will ever understand how the weather could do a complete 180 like that). It's not quite like any season in Montana, and certainly not like the beginning of winter/Christmas weather. I feel like I'm in some kind of Twilight zone where the passage of time follows a whole new set of rules, and is most distinctly marked by the presence or absence of rain and the state of the milpas, or cornfields. Back in the "summer months"' (but what they call winter), the corn stalks boasted dark green shiny leaves. Beginning in October, they crisped and curled into a pale golden brown that glows copper when the morning or evening light hits it. Now, harvest time, the corn stalks have either been toppled haphazardly to the ground (to collect the dried corn) or chopped all together, leaving the bare mounds of earth bristled with spiky stumps. The milpas are interspersed throughout the town, and now that they've been chopped down, suddenly the town has opened up and you can see the neighboring houses and stores as if several curtains dividing up the town had suddenly been drawn, leaving the buildings bare and exposed.

As far as Christmas, it has been acknowledged in small ways, but it is not the explosion of Christmas that takes place back home. Decorations have popped up on a few houses, a scattering of a few Christmas lights and an occassional tree poking up from a roof (since most of the houses are made of concrete block, most of them are square with a flat roof you can access, including mine). Apparently here the Christmas trees go on the roofs rather than in windows. The hardware store that my host family operates has been transformed, in the evenings, into a flashing singing Christmas wonderland of electronic santas and little trees and Christmas lights, products they're selling. (But inside the house, there's nary a Christmas decoration to be seen.) And on the camionetas (buses) I occassionally hear a Christmas song in Spanish. Mostly, they just get on my nerves though. The songs are either manically upbeat and happy or so sticky sweet and sappy that they make me feel more scroogish about the season. (They're probably no more corny than the songs back home, but because a series of happy memories are not attaced to them, they don't have the same effect). For someone who dearly loves Christmas, I'm mostly trying to ignore it this year. It's so different here as to be almost a completely different holiday, and thinking too much about the Christmas that's going on at home just makes me homesick. So generally I'm just trying to pretend it's not going on.

At one point I did try to acknowledge Christmas. I bought a teeny Christmas tree in the supermarket and brought it home to decorate with the 6 year old girl in the family. I brought it up to the patio outside of my "apartment"(if that's what you can call it) and the neighbors accross the street that same day had put a big fake tree on their roof with lots of decorations and flashing, singing lights. I teased them that it wasn't as good as my tree, and although I'd planned on putting it somewhere inside, I decided to leave mine outside on the patio for a while accross from the big tree, on a ledge where I usually leave my dishes. Well I forgot to bring it in, or didn't bother. Of course that night happened to be very windy, and when I woke up, the tree was gone. I wasn't too worried because I figured it had fallen down to the open part of the house below, but when I asked, the family said they hadn't seen it. The little girl and I walked out to look for it on the street, but it wasn't there. I asked the neighbors accross the way, and they had not seen it either. We all figured that someone, who gets up earlier than me, must have come accross it and brought it home.

So my one attempt failed, but at least it's become a favorite joke in the neighborhood. People just love to bring up my Christmas (that I had for about 5 hours) and speculate about where it might be. I've told all the children my theory that it flew up to the mountain to live with all the other pine trees, where it is the one and only Christmas tree.