Welcome to the new year

Happy Holidays to all of my friends and family. I hope that you all enjoyed the season thoroughly. I had a great holiday season filled with visits from family, new experiences with the community and just a good amount of cheer!

My parents came down and visited me for a few weeks. My dad was here to celebrate christmas and we had a fabulous time. We celebrated with the dearest family here, the family of the woman in charge of the women´s artisan group. We made delicious traditional food. All day Christmas eve, we prepared tamales and wrapped them up in banana leaves and cooked them on the fire. In Panama, you stay up until midnight on christmas eve to bring in christmas day. I was in charge of the desserts for this grand family celebration ( and when I say grand, I mean that probably a total of 40 people ate at this festivity). I made cake and pie and tiny cinnimon rolls which were a great hit. The family that we celebrated with is very fortunate in the community and had saved up all year and bought a generator for christmas, so they could have light for the celebration. So I had electricity for the night! We even got to decorate a small fake christmas tree and put some lights on it, but only here would you have to worry about scorpìons stinging you while putting up the christmas tree! Christmas day we made a big traditional soup called rondon with fish smoked over the fire and all sorts of lovely root vegetables and other wild veggies. And from there, my dad and I walked from house to house, handing out those little candy canes to all the little children. I think we may have confused the kids, seeing to that my dad has a white beard and was handing out candy canes on christmas day. But the truth is, Santa is not a tradition from here and not too many kids are aware of his presence in the world. We were very fortunate to celebrate christmas with such abundance, as there is a lack of food in the community after the storm and not every family was as lucky to get to make a special meal for the occation. But most found enough spare change to have a drink (asi es la vida).
The holidays were a time that passed quickly but really enjoyably, with all these amazing new experiences. But I missed you all, all my friends and family and the snow. It is quite hard to even comprehend snow, but yes, if I think really hard in my mind, I can maybe start to see a flake or two.