Since I’m writing from my point of view of all this, I’ll say, I was awake celebrating with a Colombian-Peruvian friends of ours, food is passed around, drinks and the music never stops. At the stroke of midnight the presents were passed around and opened.
The very next day we come down our Hispanic cloud and find ourselves sitting around a table with our family, the table is decorated by food and snacks. The rice, the chicken and the ham, there’s no prayer before, just a nice ‘Merry Christmas and dig in’ said and we start eating and conversing. Later that Christmas day we go house visiting and people visit us in return. We got one visitor early in the morning, a glass of whatever they want is put in front of them and a plate of food or snacks -it’s a bit of tradition- always greet visitors with anything you have on these days.
It was raining very hard that day.
By the end, we’re tired, some of us drunk, but we’re so full it feels like we ate an entire elephant and asked for seconds. One thing we relate Christmas easily too is that food was never ending thing.
Well, it isn’t much like that now, soon the entire tradition will go to hell and Christmas will be spent in your home asleep.
The next day nothing is really done, last minutes visits here and there and that’s it. We mostly spend it at home.
The 27th, at least this year, was the beginning of the explosions. Fireworks come on the marker at licensed dealers all over the island. That’s when the Crazy Bangs and what-not start being thrown everywhere and the pagaras begin to explode to bits. The noisy days start from that morning until after the second or third of January. The last day to sell is the 31st and at midnight, people all over the island will sit back and watch their money fly off into the air and evaporate into a beautiful shower of artificial lights.
The pagara start earlier in the morning, when businesses all over the island shut their doors for the last time this year, it is to run off with the bad luck, the bad mojo and gain them more success in the upcoming year. The longer the pagara is, the better-we have one of 50.000 shots for our tiny business here and another of 100.000 shots for our midnight salutation of our money. A bit over 400 bucks was spent.
pagara:
Give me the English name for Pagara please. A REALLY BIG ROPE OF FIRE CRACKERS. I don't know.
I find it idiotic to see my family buying them. I would prefer sitting back and watching other people’s money fly into the air and burn, but then again, if you do that, the night will be a bit more boring. The champagne we open at midnight can only do so much. With fireworks exploding and flying around and our traditional Dande playing through the radio the New Year might just be a good one.
We all know we need a better year to come, although 2009 was still the worst, compared to all my 17 years combined.
Dande:
So Happy New Year Mibbians and may the journal section keep being active for me to stalk.