Christmas in Bulgaria

December 18 – 25

Crossing the Border in Santa Hats

The Bulgarian border crossing guards looked into our train compartment and immediately started laughing and speaking to us in Bulgarian. Emma, Bjorn and I wore the santa hats that I bought at the Euro store in Athens. The guards obviously thought this was quite amusing and made several jokes in Bulgarian. They included us in the joke by smiling and making eye contact. This was to be the way that many of the Bulgarians we met tried to communicate. They just chatter away and when we give them a blank look, they start speaking louder and add gestures. The interesting thing is that they eventually succeed. This is the first country we visited that has relatively few tourists and the Bulgarians are as interested in us as we are interested in them. We feel very welcome here and it turned out to be a wonderful place to celebrate christmas.
-Margit

Sofia train station looks festive, but dress warmly. It's not heated.

Buying warm clothes from gypsies at the market in Samarkov

It is cold here. Our usual uniform of a fleece thrown on over a tee shirt is not going to work. Bjorn somehow managed to wear his sandals the whole trip so far. We set off the first day in Sofia looking for the christmas market. I had some romantic notion that we would find hand knitted mittens, buy hot cider and stroll through the market admiring the beautiful locally made ornaments. We never found the market. The stores have the same ornaments and clothing that we have back in the states. We did find an outdoor soccer field where players ran on a field cleared of snow. We also found an outdoor clothing market where people sold ski gear out of their trucks. It was dark and they were packing up but we managed to find hats and mittens for all of us. Amazing how a nice warm hat can completely change your perspective and your mood.

Later, when we settled in Borovets, the largest ski area in Bulgaria, we looked all over for a store where we could find some cheap clothing to wear for the week. We hit the jackpot with a used clothing store in a nearby town where we got turtlenecks and sweaters for 2 dollars each. The next day we found a little market. Small booths displayed warm clothes, toys and food. It was quite unlike what I imagined. It was more of a flea market with dollar store goods for sale. We had lots of fun looking around.

We discovered a booth with snow boots for the kids. The older couple behind the counter got very excited because they took one look at Bjorn in his sandals and knew they would make a sale. They rushed about trying to find the right size and then the man disappeared. We found a pair for Emma and the woman said in Bulgarian. “ No, no those boots are not right.” She gave me another pair and sure enough they were a better fit. I paid and we started to leave but she started to talk to me again, shaking her head and pointing at Bjorn. Mitch was off buying warm socks and returned just as the man came running up with another pair. He handed the boots to Bjorn and laughed telling us the same story over and over again in Bulgarian. Who knows where he went but he sure thought it was funny. We couldn’t help but laugh as well.

Later on, Mitch looked at some snow pants being sold by a woman half his size wearing a scarf and a long skirt with an apron. He would pick up a pair and she would grab them away and hand him another holding them up to his waist. Soon a small group gathered around us watching the fitting. People offered their opinion. It wasn’t clear who worked there as a debate about the price began. The small woman was quite offended at the price that one man offered. We finally decided to move on. A man and his wife who were observing the debate wandered up to us later on. They spoke english and the man had no front teeth. He warned us about pick pockets. He also said that the people here were gypsies. The prices will be different when you return. They’ll go down.”
-Margit

Chopping down a Christmas tree with a Swiss Army knife

Naturally, being gone from home for a year is going to lead to homesickness at times, and Christmas is certainly a ripe opportunity for that. Aside from the obvious religious inferences, we tried to think of the necessary ingredients that are important to the season. The immediate family we have, but we would be missing extended family and friends. Snow, Christmas trees, decorations, and music were the other things that came immediately to mind. How essential were each item, and how to get them?

A month or two ago, Margit and I talked with the kids about where they might want to spend Christmas. Initially, we considered Bethlehem. It seemed a natural, and is in the neighborhood of our travels at that time. With more thought, though, we decided against it. First of all, we thought it might be a bit crowded at that time, and might be a hassle to get to, being on the West Bank, and secondly, there is no snow. We ended up deciding we needed to go someplace there would be snow. Originally, we confined our search to places in Greece and Turkey. With a little more research, we found that lodging in ski areas (where we figured the chance of snow was good, and the opportunity for things to do was high) was a bit pricey. Then I stumbled on a blog that suggested Bulgaria. It has turned out to be just the ticket. A beautiful alpine setting, nice lodging, very affordable, and a tradition of celebrating Christmas themselves.

We decided to do something we had not done since our days living in Breckenridge, CO; cut our own tree. Plenty of suitable trees were around. The only problem was how to cut one down. We looked for a small saw in a number of stores without success. Finally I decided that rather than cutting the tree down, I would carve it down with my Swiss Army knife. It would, of course, limit the size of the tree a bit, but we didn’t want a big tree anyway, given our limited available space in our cabin, and the limited ornaments we would have. I was a bit concerned that it might turn into a long, slow process, but my worries were misplaced. That knife has one sharp blade! After 10-15 minutes, my work was done, and we had a lovely Charlie Brown tree. Normally we would have looked at it with disdain, but this was our tree, sought out and found by ourselves, in a foreign country away from family and friends. The tree became that much more special to us. As Bjorn keeps repeating, “I like that tree”.

-Mitch

The mighty knife and it's fallen subject

Decorating the tree with homemade oranaments

Because we are in a state of constant travel, ornaments were not on our list of things to bring on the trip, and it was not worth buying enough ornaments to cover our scraggy tree. First on the list would be a angel for the tree. As we have nothing of the sort, we resorted to a toy named Natalie Breez.

Mrs. Breez

She isn’t the most angelic figure. To remedy that, Mom and Emma decided to sew her an angel costume. They stopped on a fabric shopping expedition in Athens after we finished watching Harry Potter 7. They came back with two large strips of gold and red fabric. Once we made it to Bulgaria, they lay them out and Emma began designing the outfit. A few arguments later, she had the two halves of the outfit cut out, and began sewing it. It took a while, and when she was finished, mom turned it inside out to hide the frills. Fortunately for us, Natalie is buildable toy, so we were able to take her apart to fit on the finished outfit. Once that was done, a red string was tied around her waist, completing the angel outfit. All that was left was to put her on the tree, something easier said than done. In the end I managed it, and we stepped back to admire our work.

Then came the ornaments. On our massive grocery shopping expedition in Sofia, Dad picked up a few chocolate ornaments, which we used to decorate our tree with the promise that we’d eat them on Christmas day. He also got a few chocolate santas, which we ate and then turned their foil wrapping paper into ornaments, an idea suggested by Dad after his first around the world trip Christmas as a college student 33 years ago.

Emma drew an angel, and a postcard supplied another ornament. Emma also put a pompom from her hat on the tree, and a got we plastic tree ornament from a bonus ticket which we acquired at the grocery store in Sofia.

Then, of course, we needed to hang them.

A few days later, I walked in to the cabin after accessing the wi-fi at the resturant to see Emma and Mom beginning to string popcorn. Of course, I jumped right in, and spent about an hour sticking a needle through popcorn after popcorn. Mom also had the bright idea to use pomegranate skin every three or four popcorns to add a little color. The process was long, interspaced with the occasional needle coming unthreaded incident. I finished mine as Emma started another string. Mom tied the two together to complete the thread.

We hung that up, and our tree was finished

I appreciated it even more considering that we had to chop it down and make the ornaments ourselves.
-Bjorn

Baking cookies with limited supplies

The first step for baking cookies is getting the ingredients which we had a little trouble finding. We had decided on making gingerbread cookies. So at the store we looked for nutmeg, ginger, cardamom, flour, butter, molasses, brown sugar, white sugar, and a cookie sheet. It was very hard to find these because it was all in Bulgarian and none of us can read or speak it. Some of the packages had English on them but most had Bulgarian. The ginger packet had English on it so that was good but the rest of them didn’t. Mom found a package of unground cardamom but they didn’t have any ground cardamom so we didn’t get it. They didn’t have molasses either. Dad found a package of dark brown sugar and that had so much molasses in it, it substituted for the molasses. We also found some white sugar. We couldn’t
Find a baking sheet though. We got one later at a gypsy market. We also got butter and flour later in a super market in Borovets.

When we got back to our place Mom, Bjorn and I pretended we were chefs. I was chef Gispacho, Bjorn was Jr. Chef Jeremy, and mom was cook Margit, and dad was our customer. We needed a blender for the butter but we didn’t have one so Bjorn and I had to stir it with spoons. But it didn’t work so Bjorn and I brought it in the sauna. But that didn’t work either. So mom put it on the stove to heat up the butter. Then we added the flour. Once we made the dough we put it in the fridge to wait for tomorrow. The next day we had to take the dough out to thaw while we went to an old hunting lodge that the king of Bulgaria used to use. But it turned out to be closed so we came back early to work on the cookies. We didn’t have rolling pins either so we had to use glasses as our rolling pins. The dough was still a little stiff so at first we had to press hard. But it eventually grew soft.

These are a few things that we shaped our ginger bread men of: gingerbread men, gingerbread women, a gingerbread baby, a cat, a scorpion, a fat gingerbread man, a gingerbread cool guy, a tree, triangles, and circles.

-Emma