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First Christmas In Oaxaca 2006

The Zocalo is lovely now with Christmas events every night. Both the teachers and the police are out of the Zocalo now.

Last night the Canadian couple, Ana and Steve and their 3 year old son Oscar, and Joe from Chicago, in the other two apartments, and I “caroled” the manager’s family in the 4th apartment. Then we set up a table and chairs in the courtyard with Rampope (a kind of alcoholic eggnog with milk and almond flavoring made by the nuns here) and chocolate, cookies and Ana’s gingerbread house. We showed slides on Joe’s laptop computer of snowy northern America and wore scarves around our necks even though it was pretty warm out at 7pm. Our singing was pretty sick…there were so few of us and Joe had to print out the words to Christmas songs because we couldn’t remember them. I tried to get some video in the dark and sing too which was pretty ridiculous. Funniest part was that Joe lined up two rows of chairs facing each other…one row for them and one row for us. As only two of us spoke Spanish that was pretty ridiculous too. I had invited my friend Max along and bought him a Santa’s hat which, with his white beard and red shirt made him look almost like Santa. But he doesn’t speak Spanish either.

Then the manager’s family brought a TV set out to the courtyard and we watched the wedding of the manager and his wife after 40 years of living together without benefit of marriage papers! Apparently that is quite common here in Mexico. The wedding was on their 40th anniversary of being together in the huge beautiful Soledad Church here last year… filled with friends and family. Last night was the first anniversary of their formal marriage. Then the video showed a huge party…dinner and dance. Some of the dancers followed a traditional custom of holding female and male turkeys! I had never seen that before! They have worked selling chilis in the Abastos Market here for those 40 years…from 5:30 in the morning until 9 at night…along with their son. (Sounds like farmers to me…like my parents) Their thirty something son lives part of the time with his parents in the apartment here and part of the time in another house with his common-law wife who is expecting a baby in January. I think this comes from a mix of traditional indigenous cultural practices with modern Catholicism although Ana told me today that the young “wife” won’t let the son live with her because of his temper. Ana speaks fluent Spanish so I have found out more about the managers in the last couple weeks than I ever found out by myself in the 7 months I have lived here!



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One response to “First Christmas In Oaxaca 2006”

  1. Max Uhler says:

    I was the red shirt Santa on the occasion in question and I thought the whole evening was charming. The Mexican neighbors seemed to really appreciate our pitiful attempts at Christmas music ( which weren’t much worse, really, than you would experience in your cubicle in a stateside office). The 40th anniversary cum wedding film was lovely, I thought. There is a long tradition of anti-clericalisim here, and the church has made a virtue out of neccesity.Eunice was as charming as only she can be, but nervous as a cat trying to hide shit on a tin roof. She has much more cross-cultural experience than I have so I can’t comment on that. But my impression was that everyone, the gringos, the canucks and the Mexicans all had a good time and found a lot of common ground. It was a little weird to be seated mano a mano, though. But what can you expect? The chairs were set up by a retired accountant. Max

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