Post 26: Deck the Halls with Banana Leaves

In a country where over 95% of the population is Buddhist, I was not expecting much out of the holiday season. Temperatures are in the 70s and someone asked me if Santa Claus was Jesus’ father. My attempts to teach a lesson about Hanukkah garnered blank stares, as to understand about Hanukkah, one must first understand about Jews. Or at least know what a Jew is. I realized that just because there is a Thai word for “Jew” (Yiew) does not mean the Thais are acquainted with it. It is like when I first arrived and my host sister persisted in holding up oblong pink fruit covered in green hair and exclaiming “rambutan”, because that was allegedly the English word for it. These things aside, it just didn’t feel like the holidays. Thousands of miles away from my family, cold weather, and lights, there was nothing holidayish to put me in the spirit. No latke parties where I try to break the world latke eating record (48); no distressing Sarah by picking out the most rotund Christmas tree available; no rushing through the menorah lighting and obligatory Jewish songs in order to feel like we’ve earned our gifts; no Christmas herbroy’s and cheesecake (it’s a Grant thing); no watching White Christmas until the TV shuts off in protest.
Fortunately in the universe’s effort to combat my scrooginess, Katelyn received a holiday package from home. It was filled with comfort food, house decorations, and Christmas movies. Katelyn generously invited a four of us ladies to her house in Loei to share in the festive wealth. After the lengthy journey to her home in Patchom district, in the far ends of Thailand on the mountainous Laos border, we arrived to find it hoodie weather and Christmas carols audible from the street. The weekend started, as all good things should, with mashed potatoes. Katelyn’s mother sent her instant garlic mashed potatoes, as well as canned corn, cranberry sauce, and instant chocolate pudding. We tossed in some locally purchased grilled chicken as a turkey substitute and cleaned our plates in an embarrassingly quick period of time. There was dish-licking to involved, and I am ashamed to say I experimented with dipping cranberry sauce in gravy in order to prolong the meal. I wouldn’t recommend it, by the way. Over the next day, we strung up Christmas lights, read horoscopes, and watched Home Alone. We snuggled all together under blankets and became so absorbed in the movie that it was bizarre and disorienting when it ended and we found ourselves in Thailand. Afterwards we played naughty Pictionary with a holiday theme, and a rousing round of Apples to Apples. The Christmas spirit was slowly creeping its way in.
Christmas Day was still 3 weeks away, but my newly found holiday cheer led me to stop at the big grocery store in the city to purchase flour and baking soda, so I could make rice-cooker cookies for my students. Time moseyed on as it does at site. I was teaching the “time” unit to my older students and got into an argument with Pii Som who insists we use military time in America. I went with Jon and Film to his friend’s house, on a lake in the mountains in my district, where we ate outside overlooking the water, and I read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy while everyone else played the very dull and incomprehensible card game for upwards of 8 hours. We made two more batches of soap at Thangam, experimenting with different recipes, and I received a call from the country director saying he picked me to be this quarters “Volunteer Success Story”. I made peanut butter from scratch in my mortar and pestle and attempted tomato basil soup, which came out more like gazpacho. I planned classroom activities for the week before Christmas, read four books, and worked on a collage to decorate my austere and icky green bedroom walls.
For some reason, Christmas is part of the Thai national curriculum, and thus both my schools wanted me to lead all the students in “Christmas games”. I tried to explain that schools are closed for the holidays in America, and we don’t really play Christmas games, per say. We may make cookies, put up decorations, and sing carols, but that is not the same as having an arsenal of games to keep 850 students occupied for an entire afternoon, as was expected of me. Luckily other volunteers have faced this same problem, and there is a consecrated Peace Corps document filled with just the kind of activities the Thais would go nuts for, like pin the nose on the Rudolph and throwing “snowballs” made from wet tissue paper at a snowman target. I also made two big posters with pictures from Christmas around the world, from Mexico to Russia to India, to show that Christmas is not only celebrated by Anglo-Saxons, and a Hanukkah poster which images of menorahs, dreidels, latkes, and animals wearing kippahs and a talis. At my little school, we spent an enjoyable and goofy hour saying “Merry Christmas” in different languages, based off a list I found online. So Priecgus Ziemassvetkus, Maligayan Pasko, and Hristos se Rodi to you: Merry Christmas in Lettish, Tagalog, and Serbian respectively.
On actual Christmas morning, I told each school I had to go to the other, and spent a leisurely morning making banana nut pancakes from scratch (amazing), drinking coffee, and making Christmas cards. I also opened the presents my dad sent from home, including a set of beautiful Egyptian cotton sheets, which will make sleeping on my floor mattress worlds more comfortable, as well as Christmas CDs and my movie, White Christmas. That afternoon, I went to my big school and facilitated three hours worth of Christmas games. At the end of the activities, I was handed a gift. I was touched and a goofy grin spread over my face. The teacher then looked at me and said in Thai “because today is Santa Claus’ birthday, really truly”. Oooohhh, silly me. The gift was not for me, not to say “Merry Christmas, we know it must be hard being here alone for Christmas, and by the way, thank you for dedicating hours of your free time to constructing a giant reindeer poster and snowman”. No, rather the gift was for the over-sized ninth grader dressed up as Santa, and it was handed to me to thus hand to him, so they could take a picture. I was feeling Scrooge-like again.
Kelsi, too, was feeing a bit curmudgeonly, and came to hang out at my site for a day. I met her at the bus station, so I could reserve tickets for my New Years trip to Chiang Mai. New Years is an actual Thai holiday, and thus schools are closed and volunteers are allowed to leave site. Chiang Mai is a big New Years destination however, and even five days in advance, all the night bus tickets were sold out, meaning our journey will be rather inconvenient. By we, I mean my cousin Erin who will get here tomorrow for a visit. She is setting up her own volunteer travel company with projects in Nepal, India, Cambodia, and Thailand, and will be in Thailand for about a month scouting sites and making contacts (www.edgeofseven.com, check it out). But she is taking a week off to visit me at site and then celebrate New Years together.
Anyway, Kelsi and I went to the big grocery store and bought materials to make pasta for dinner (in the rice cooker of course). We had both made cookies the previous week, and I had leftover pancake batter. It promised to be a rather carbohydrate heavy event, but what evokes Christmas better than carbs? We also bought apple juice, cinnamon sticks, and the ubiquitous Hong Thong (sweet Thai whiskey that tastes like rum) to make cider. My kitchen’s rather limited options meant that the cooking process took hours, but we did it over our delicious hot rum cider and with Christmas carols in the background. We attempted to watch White Christmas (which I already watched the night before), but promptly fell asleep between the comforting drinks, full stomach, and lovely new sheets. The next morning, I woke up in a New Years cleaning frenzy, and feverishly scrubbed, swept, and organized my entire house. Tomorrow, I go pick up Erin at the bus station, Tuesday is the “hygiene day” at my little school, meant to be the culmination of the soap project: round 1, and Wednesday there is a New Years party at my big school. Then I head up to Chiang Mai, for a weekend I hope will involve cousinly bonding, sunrise adventures, and falafel.