Cultural Differences

Kelly spent a good portion of the week leading up to Christmas correcting the kiddos everytime they said that Christmas is on the 24th. Christmas Day. Christmas Eve. Either way we´re still celebrating Jesus´ birth and either way its still your country so we´ll celebrate it as you see fit.

Either way the Church will cover baby Jesus´ manger with red lights and put it right in front of the altar. Either way he´ll be a ceramic baby Jesus the size of a 11 month old, in mid-kick, wearing a pink dress and matching pink socks. Either way Padre will lift him up and have the little guy do the final blessing and either way we´ll all line up and go give him a kiss after Mass (the baby, not Padre).  

So after evening Mass on Christmas Eve we all waited until about 11pm to eat dinner. Then at mid-night we all gathered around the manger scene and put baby Jesus in there as we sang Christmas carols and prayed. Then we hugged every single person in the room and told them "feliz navidad!". Afterward we sat down for dessert and presents. It was so very festive!!

Speaking of manger scenes, they´re not tidy and confined as they are in the States. Instead the paper mache hills and sky take up a corner of the room, adorned with various sizes of figurines and, of course, lights that play music. This is true in the houses and the Churches. The Church´s in which we went to Christmas Day Mass was 5 tiered! The bottom 3 featured barbies and toy trucks. And batman. I´m serious. At Consecration was the usual hear-attack because they set off fireworks RIGHT OUTSIDE the Church. Not the kind that are pretty when they explode, just the kind that sound like an air-raid. At the moment of Consecration. They´ve been doing this the whole time we´ve been here (they do all though December and for all festivals), so you´d think we´d be used to it, but man, they´ll get you. There you are, wrapped in prayer in the most holy moment, and they set of bombs for a solid 2 minutes.

After recovering you manage to muster the courage to move and recieve Holy Communion, foolishly thinking you´re in the clear, but you are prevented from returning to your seat because the dog (who had been sleeping but probably was awoken by the explosions) is barking and growling at you. Not the person in front of you. Not Kelly or Colleen. Nope. Just you. But you should have known better than to sit in his pew.

Different cultures´conceptions of beauty are just different. Not better or worse, just different. And there´s beauty in the complexity- that they´re not all the same. I am so grateful that God is letting me celebrate His comming in a way I otherwise never would! (Because you´d better believe in that in MY house there´ll never be a scrawny nativity scene ever again.)

HAPPY NEW YEAR.