Christmas and Jell-o Swishing

I hope everyone back home had a very Merry Christmas and is about to have a very Happy New Year! If you haven’t already (or even if you have), give someone you love a great big hug :p

I don’t want to sugarcoat my recollection of Christmas this year: being away from home during the holidays flat out sucks. I miss you all very, very, very much! And in this new environment where Christmas music isn’t very popular, I haven’t been able to get that familiar feeling of Christmas spirit or whatever you want to call it when you just know it’s almost Christmas and that knowledge makes you smile. Sun and sand are poor substitutes for a Chicago winter—sometimes I’m very grateful for that fact, but not when I want to feel like Christmas!

It also didn’t help that I got some kind of food poisoning again. I will spare you the details on what it is like to squat in the dirt in a latrine under the heat of the midday sun. On Christmas Eve. Yum.

But that is not to say that I didn’t have any fun this Christmas. I baked cookies a few days before the holiday, which meant introducing my host family to pecans for the first time—I hadn’t realized that people here in the campo have never even seen them, so I let everyone taste-test before I smashed them up with a hammer (no, I don’t have a food processor) and baked them into pecan horns (or Russian tea cakes, for everyone not in my family). The kids also had never smelled vanilla extract, which made for some funny faces. With so much newness, my host family didn’t so much help as stare at me as I baked. They did, however, enjoy eating them afterwards, and now that they have confidence in my baking abilities I’ve been enlisted to help make a cake for a birthday party next month.

In Peru, everyone celebrates on Christmas Eve (“Buena Noche”) rather than Christmas Day (“Navidad”). For lunch that day, I had roasted chicken that was probably fresher than any I’ve had in my life—only a few hours dead! That evening, I went with my host family to a niece’s house, where we had both pork and duck (also killed that morning!), and the traditional hot chocolate and panetón, or a version of the popular Italian fruit cake. Culturally, panetón is pretty random--I’m guessing it migrated to Peru from all of the Italians in Argentina? I’m not a huge fan, to be honest. It reminds me of the texture of cinnamon rolls, except since the cinnamon goo and frosting are replaced by raisins and gummy fruity things, it kind of just makes me miss Cinnabon. Couldn’t they have adopted tiramisu instead? The hot chocolate, however, is excellent—made from melted bars of chocolate instead of powder, with cinnamon and cloves.

We ate all of this by candlelight—not because we were trying to be romantic, but because the power picked an excellent time to go out. As inconvenient as that was, it did allow for the most amazing display of stars that I’ve seen since ASP. Being far from the city, I didn’t expect there to be so much light pollution, but I think it’s intensified by the dust in the air. Without light, however, even all the tiny stars in between the big ones were bright—it was the kind of sky you could get lost in.

By midnight, the lights had come back on. We watched the clock and right at 12 am everyone cheered and hugged each other, and the kids had sparklers and small firecrackers—it sort of reminded me of New Year’s. Supposedly afterwards there was some dancing, but I was tired/still sick and chose to go to bed early.

Christmas day, I watched quite a bit of Mad Men and Serenity, in between taking phone calls from some of my favorite people ever (thank you Padres + Katherine!) I also successfully satisfied my Jell-o craving—delicious! I don’t know why, but I tend to crave Jell-o a lot down here. Thankfully it’s very easy to make, plus there is always someone walking around selling it ready made in the markets or at bus stops.

I’ll end with a random Jell-o related story: I really have only one concrete memory of my great aunt Stell (she died when I was young) and of course it involves Jell-o. I was at a restaurant with a bunch of family and had gotten Jell-o cubes off of the buffet table, which I was swishing around between my teeth (if you don’t know the joy that is Jell-o swishing, I highly recommend making some right now and giving it a try!). Of course my mom told me to stop—it’s not exactly good table manners. But Aunt Stell was sitting nearby and contradicted her—she laughed and said that she liked eating it that way, too. I’m not sure that my mother appreciated her input, but I do know that I still love to swish my Jell-o. I’m such a rebel :p