Xmas Firecrackers

So much for "Silent Night." Starting about midday on 24 December, my São Paulo neighborhood was treated to almost an almost constant onslaught of firecrackers. I thought the revolution had arrived. I can only imagine what New Year´s Eve and January 1 will be like. Probably I should just be grateful it´s firecrackers and not bullets. Actually firecrackers are common around here all the time. I´m listening to a string of firecrackers going off even now, as I type this.

In the central valley of California, part of the Mexican-American heritage involved the firing of guns into the air at midnight to welcome the New Year. Every year, when I lived in Tulare, there would be reminders on the news programs and in the papers about the risks of this practice and people were urged not to do it but, of course, a lot of people ignored these cautionary warnings. And frequently there would be injuries. One year, I remember, a person in Visalia was shot in his/her living room by a celebratory bullet. A friend of mine who knew someone on the Stockton police department said that everyone in that department parked his/her squad car under an overpass a few minutes before midnight, and stayed there until all the bullets had fallen back to earth. Don´t know if that´s true or not, but it sounds smart.

Metaphorically at least, it was a quiet, uneventful and barely-noticed christmas for me here. Perhaps not speaking the language very well isolates me from more than I realize, but it does seem to be a lower-key holiday here. Certainly it is a big event and the large retailers and malls hype it just as in the US, but it feels a bit less omnipresent somehow. I was trying to explain to someone recently my relationship with christmas. She assumed it was a holiday that I actively disliked and reacted against, and I said that, while that may have been rather true at one time, now I am mostly oblivious to it. I explained that christmas is like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. I know they all exist and mean something to somebody, but they don´t any of them have anything to do with me or my life, nor me with them.

But, to those of you who actively revel in the holiday, I hope you all had an enjoyable time.

And a happy 2009 to us all!