Christmas Nite Lites

Great Christmas afternoon eating, drinking good wine, and having good conversation on a great variety of subjects with our new friends Linda & Chuck (hosts) and Emma & Jon. The lights out over the valley as we rode down over the mountains coming home tonight were awesome.
It’s Christmas. It’s different from any other Christmas we’ve ever had. We miss our family. We miss our long term, loyal, forever friends. We miss shopping for fun presents and wrapping them and watching them get opened. But we are enormously grateful for our newly adopted home, for the opportunity to live in such an awesomely beautiful and fascinating place, for the amazingly warm and friendly people, the opportunity to learn and live in a new culture, and for the wonderful new friends we are making, who, while adding a whole new dimension to our lives, will never be able to replace the old friends and family we left behind. Hopefully all of them will eventually find their way down here to visit us.

Holiday Customs

There are some odd combinations of customs here. Of course it's a very Catholic country. Throughout the evening and late into the night on Christmas Eve, we heard church bells ringing. Beautiful. There are so many beautiful old churches, and several are close enough for us to hear the bells toll. But we also listened to the fireworks late into the night. How did fireworks ever get to be part of Christmas? Some of them sounded like bombs going off in front of our house!

Every house in Costa Rica, as near as I can tell, has a crèche in, or in front of, the house. Many of them are huge, and very detailed. Apparently historically, in keeping with the private celebration of Christmas, the crèches were inside the house. In recent years, the Ticos have started decorating outside, and the displays of lights and huge crèches and other decorations are fantastic. I wonder how some of them can afford the electricity bills.
I suspect that the stores sell more during December than they do the entire remainder of the year. This is largely because every Tico worker, by law, must be paid a full month's salary as a bonus during the first week in December. Rather civilized idea, don't you think?
And of course the food. It's a big tradition here to have tamales for Christmas. Apparently every woman in Costa Rica has her own recipe for tamales, and prepares large batches of them. They are fabulous. I don't know what other things they cook for the Holidays, but I can tell you that the aromas coming from my next door neighbor's kitchen last night were so incredible, I thought of going over and standing at the door looking hungry. This morning there are more aromatic foods being prepared over there.
Speaking of food, we have been invited to Christmas dinner this afternoon at the home of our friends Linda and Chuck, who I had met when I was down here two years ago. They live further up the mountains from us, real country, with a fabulous view. It will be fun!

Feliz Navidad de Costa Rica

It's Christmas morning at our casa in Siboney de San Pablo de Heredia de Costa Rica. As I sat in the courtyard peeling onions for our traditional creamed boiled onions, I daydreamed about all the Christmases past. Has there ever been a Christmas when I haven't made boiled onions? I don't think so. Are my kids making boiled onions today? I doubt it. Funny. I always thought I was raising them to be totally independent. But now I think I failed to teach them the most basic of important things. Creamed boiled onions on Christmas day.
Today is very different from our Christmases past. In some ways it may be like Christmas forty years ago or more in the U.S. Especially if you were Catholic. Which I wasn't.

Last night we went downtown to go to mass at the beautiful old church by el parque central in downtown Heredia. We didn't know what time the service was, so we got there at almost seven, just in time to hear the end of the Ave Maria, which was incredibly beautiful. There weren't as many people there as I had expected. But then we realized that almost everyone goes to the midnight mass. After the mass, they go home for dinner. We enjoyed walking downtown on Christmas eve. There were a lot of people out and about, but not nearly as many as the night before, when it appeared that absolutely everyone was downtown doing last minute shopping. Buying a few gifts for our friends, I thought this must be like Christmas in New York, with all the hustle and bustle, street vendors selling everything, and bubbly young women cheerfully wrapping gifts for their customers. It was fun.
Speaking of view, it is the most glorious Christmas day in Costa Rica. I'm sitting barefoot in the courtyard writing this. It's warm and sunny and beautiful. Our house is enclosed by this beautiful private courtyard downstairs, so there's no view. But from upstairs, we see out over the valley and to the mountains on the other side. It is so beautiful. I really can't believe we live in a place like this. We’re so lucky. At night the lights all across the valley and into the hills are absolutely indescribable.

Unfurnished

As I’ve mentioned, the house we’ve rented is unfurnished. I probably should describe what that means in Costa Rica. Generally speaking an unfurnished Tico house has nothing in it. I mean it has no appliances, no kitchen cabinets, no closets, no medicine cabinets or shelving or mirrors in the bathroom. Emma was relieved when the landlady told her that, unlike most Tico houses, hers already had light fixtures. She was excited that she wouldn't have to shop for light fixtures to cover all the bare light bulbs. Then she found out that what the landlady meant was that it comes equipped with light bulbs! So we're all out shopping for light fixtures, among other things. We've done a lot of shopping together, and have lent and shared and got by and laughed a lot! By the time we moved in, we had a mattress, fridge, stove, washing machine, beautiful rattan table and chairs for courtyard, some cooking pans and a set of dishes for 4. We also had a few odds and ends like some drinking glasses, wine glasses (priorities, you know), "silverware," and a few other little things for the kitchen. We keep acquiring more stuff, but as I mentioned before, shopping can be a challenge. We have been known to spend days shopping for sheets and towels and a blender for Jon, which he apparently could not live without! A set of bed sheets can cost $60 - $80. The locally made ones aren't made quite big enough to keep the bottom sheet on the mattress. Some of them have fabric that is close to burlap! If I'm ever in a Target store in my life again, I'll probably buy every set of plain white percale sheets on the shelf! But life is good. On Monday we found a bathroom mirror. It is framed in bamboo and I'm in 7th heaven. Of course I got to see myself for the first time in 3 weeks, which was kind of frightening!
No matter what else it is, it's always an adventure!

Christmas Gifts

I miss buying presents for everyone, wrapping them on the kitchen table, delivering them up to my friends and family. But there are so many wonderful things about Christmas here. Historically Christmas is a family thing here. All the family gathers for Christmas Eve and Christmas day and many other parties during the season. The entire family participates, and in that way, it reminds me of Christmas many years ago in the U.S., a time when life was simpler. I always think of Christmas as a kid when we all went to Gramma's house! Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, old, young, everyone. And presents under the tree for everyone. Of course most of the presents were handmade. Not because we were so arty and creative and individualistic, but because there was no money to buy lots of store-bought things. For some reason, I always remember making pin cushions out of walnut shells! Every adult in the family must have had a huge collection of walnut shell pin cushions accumulating in a drawer somewhere! But it was important to have a gift for each person. A lot of aprons got made. My mother worked on her knitting year round. We all had the most beautiful sweaters. And every kid in town had a pair of my mother's mittens! My grandmother crocheted beautiful things. Everybody made something.

Self Service - Not

Self service has not come to Costa Rica yet! Having someone wait on you can be very nice. Sometimes it’s aggravating having a “helpful” clerk follow you around while you shop. In many places, like the hardware store or the pharmacy, the merchandise is not out for you to see and touch. It is thus necessary to explain to the clerk, in Spanish, what you would like to purchase. The clerk then goes to the back to find the item for you. Once the item has been located and you have agreed to buy it, the clerk writes up a sales slip, which you take to the caja (cashier) and pay. The cashier takes your colones, gives you change, stamps the sales slip paid. You then take the paid sales slip back to the sales clerk, who packages your merchandise and gives it to you. Sometimes instead of going back to the sales clerk, you go to the paquette desk to retrieve your stuff. In the case of the Christmas gifts I bought today, after returning to my sales clerk, I found that I was supposed to go to the line at the paquette and wait while the sales clerk looked in the back for the boxes. While standing in line, I saw that other customers were getting their purchases gift wrapped and asked if I could get mine wrapped too. Just like any big store in any big city during Christmas week, I thought. When it was my turn, one of the bubbly young women spent about fifteen minutes meticulously wrapping my four gifts with beautiful paper and fancy ribbons. When she was finished, they were a work of art. I said yes to the gift tags, she smiled appreciatively when I told her they were muy bonito, and wrote me up another sales slip, for the wrapping, which I then took to the caja, paid 300 colones ($.80), obtained my stamped slip, returned to the paquette, and obtained my gifts. When you're accustomed to self service, it all seems a bit awkward and time consuming. But here it's the way it's done, you get a lot of service, you learn patience, people smile and say friendly things, and it doesn't cost much.

Every Day Another Incredible Experience!

We were downtown at Mas por Menos, a medium sized grocery store. The pre-Christmas crowds were huge everywhere we went. Suddenly we heard beautiful Christmas music and wound our way through the aisles to see where it was coming from. There was a whole choir singing by the checkout counters. We learned that they were a project of the University, although some of the singers were way under university age. It was an wonderful full professional choir, with a conductor and the whole thing. Some of the most beautiful Christmas music I've ever heard, in a straggly little downtown grocery store with street vendors outside crying out about their wares to the crowds. I love this place!

We've Rented a House!

We found a great 3 bedroom, 2 bath house in a nice area up on a hill near downtown Heredia. From upstairs we can see all the way across the valley to the hills on the other side. The view at night with the lights is awesome. Upstairs we have a big master bedroom with vaulted ceiling and a window seat. There are also 2 small bedrooms with windows overlooking the coffee fields and the valley below. All of the upstairs floors are wood, except for the bathroom, which is tiled and has a suicide shower. Downstairs there is a long narrow living / dining room, a kitchen, and another bathroom. At the back there are French doors from both the living room and the kitchen out onto a beautiful small tiled courtyard with high vine covered walls. Off the courtyard there is a "pila" (laundry room) and a storage room. From the front of the house, you enter directly from the sidewalk (no front yard) to an extra large double garage. The garage has big double metal car doors plus the pedestrian door, so it's totally closed in from the street. But there's a break in the high roof toward the front and one side so that lots of light gets in. The garage ceiling is wood and the floor is ceramic tile. There's a pretty tropical garden area on one side. Of course we don't have a car and it's very nice out there, so Gene is going to set up his studio out there. It's much more house than we had planned to rent, but it was so fantastic compared to the other few places we'd seen in the same price range that we grabbed it. We're paying $425 per month, unfurnished. Actually we weren’t even thinking about looking at houses for probably another 6 months, but Emma and Jon invited us to go look with them and the rest just sort of happened! The landlady had 2 houses for rent and Emma and Jon have rented the other one. So we already had friends for neighbors before we even moved in. We've spent a lot of time together, out looking for the things we need to live here and just visiting. They are very friendly.