Home Comforts -- Number Three: Christmas

"More turkey? Surely you can't be serious?"

It was 13 years ago, but I still remember the first time like it were yesterday. A thunderstorm raging outside, as Bing Crosby did his best to get a word in edgeways. Gifts wrapped in snow scenes exchanged by people dressed in ever-dampening T-shirts and shorts. Every mouthful of turkey requiring its very own serviette, just to attend to the attendant sweat on one’s brow.

You can try all you like – and we missionaries certainly gave it our best shot that year – but Christmas in Bolivia just doesn’t feel quite right. And yet, we never really learn. Every year we’ve gone that extra mile to make things feel as homely as possible – watching the YouTube video of the Queen’s message, importing a turkey from Cochabamba, having someone play the role of a borderline-racist grandparent at the dinner table (OK, I made that last one up) – but when all you want for Christmas is to spend the day in a walk-in freezer, there’s only so far these efforts can take you.

The big problem, of course, is that Christmas celebrations vary wildly from country to country – and, indeed, from family to family. Here in Bolivia, Christmas is definitely in the top-ten of Important Annual Holidays (though they’ve yet to write a series of blog entries about it), but it is relatively small potatoes in comparison with the really big festival here, Carnaval, which in December lurks tantalisingly just around the corner.

Not that a stripped-down version of Christmas is such a bad thing, certainly not for the missionary crowd. Being leaner and meaner definitely keeps the true significance of the season from becoming obscured.

But, like it or not, Christmas and its assorted non-religious traditions become so instilled in us from birth, that a foreign version can only disappoint.

In Bolivia, the major difference (and one which is common to many other countries) is that Christmas is marked at midnight on the 24^th, with a huge meal served and the family staying up till around 6 in the morning. So this year, when your 3-year-old kamikazes into your bedroom, slaps you in the face and demands that presents be opened at 4 o’clock in the morning, the Bolivians will already be celebrating.

Over the years we’ve slowly learned the lesson of 2010, our first Christmas here. Deary-me, was that brutal. We reckoned that, as missionaries, it would be a pleasant gesture to invite some other families in the church, for what turned out not so much to be a Christmas dinner as a buffet for a small army. Still, there was plenty of turkey to go around. I was only just steeling myself for round two at the buffet table (naturally, I also had my eye on a spare packet of serviettes) when a bunch of the Bolivian guys declared that they were going out for a game of football. Did these people just not get it? “A game of football?!”, I seethed, “Why, the whole point of Christmas Day is to slowly but surely resemble a human football!” My pleas fell on deaf ears. I hear the goalie had a particularly accomplished afternoon.

So I am in no small way excited at the prospect of not one but two Christmases in Scotland over the coming year. I feel that after three Christmases abroad, it’s the least we’re due. Watchnight services. Cranberry sauce. It’s A Wonderful Life repeats. Zero humidity. Elderly xenophobia. I’ll save the football for Boxing Day, thank you very much.