Defining Christmas

I think this Christmas will go down in the books as the only Christmas I ever lost weight.

This is the first Christmas where I was basically on my own. I didn't have any family get togethers, cookie exchanges, Christmas cocktails or white elephant parties. Once all the pomp and circumstance is taken out of the picture, once you're in a place that is far removed from Santa Claus, you are forced to get down to the root of it. What does December 25th mean? I found myself asking my friends "What should we be doing to celebrate?" and "How can we bring some of our traditions to Peru?". After lot's of head scratching we realized, in order to answer any of these questions, we must first figure out what Christmas means to us personally. The easy answer is family and being together, and then a long list of christmas traditions like stockings on christmas morning, eggnog, dinner on Christmas Eve. So when being with family is not an option we concluded we should try to recreate some of the things from our long list of traditions.

Being sick definitely spoiled a lot of plans I had made. I wanted to spend Christmas Eve with some of the families from training and the volunteers that came back to visit. But because the Peruvian tradition is to wait until midnight to eat and then start celebrating, I would have been in pain and miserable trying to stay up late and party. I made it into Lima, where I ended up going to a friends house. We listened to Christmas music (streaming online from a Sacramento radio station) while we cooked a christmas eve dinner and baked cookies. I even made eggnog from scratch, everybody loved it. I called up Sick Boy, cause he is still stuck in Lima and invited him over. He had no plans, and I didn't want him spending Christmas Eve alone. We had a simple dinner but it was very sweet. We decided we didn't want to miss out completely on the Peruvian Christmas tradition. At midnight, Peruvians put the baby Jesus in the manger, then they go outside in the streets and light off fireworks. Since my friend lives right on the cliffs, we decided to take a long walk along the cliffs and watch the fireworks being shot over the ocean.

It was far from the crazy party I had imagined it would be. We saw next to nobody on our walk. But there were a lot of fireworks at midnight. The night was beautiful, I've never seen Lima so tranquil. Everything was so lovely and the company was so wonderful that we ended up walking for hours and didn't get home until 3. In the end, it was very difference than I imagined the night would be, but I will always remember it warmly.

Christmas day very simple as well. I ended up excepting an invitation to the house of my asistant country director of Peace Corps for a christmas meal. I am so happy I went. Marco is such a wonderful man and his family is so beautiful. Being there satisfied the longing I had for a traditional family get together. But what was ironic to me about this holiday meal is that it felt more like the forth of July than christmas. One of Marco's high school friends (they're from Mountain View, CA by the way) was visiting with his family. So all the kids were playing on the big trampoline, the slip n' slide and the pool. We ate out on the patio and it was a nice summer day. The kicker was that we were eating turky, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and green bean casarole. So it was a traditional american holiday meal set to the backround of a summer BBQ. But being at Marco's really made my Christmas. It gave me what I was missing and afterwards I felt like I had successfully completed my definition of Christmas.....almost

I was feeling really stressed out at the end of the night. More than stressed, I was feeling o lot of anxiety. I was thinking too much about the next year and all the challenges that lay ahead of me. So my friend and I went out to a very posh bar built into a cliff and had a christmas cocktail. It was the first alcohol I had consumed since before falling sick. So, two American girls sat in Peru on christmas night, drinking Pisco Sours, reflecting on 2007 and talking about our hopes and fears of 2008.

I hope that next Christmas I will be healthy and also more at east with myself and how I feel about where I am. But I also hope I will be fortunate enought to have as peaceful and blessed Christmas as I did this year.