Some of you have asked about Christmas here in Tanzania. Context clues when Christmas is approaching are few but oddly garish in tropical snow-less countries like Tanzania. Thanks to healthy trade with India and South Africa (and increasingly, China), we suffered no shortage here this holiday season of gaudy foil banners, tinsel, lights, cheap plastic ornaments, and unattractive plastic foil giftwrap to herald the glorious occasion of Christ’s birth. The intense heat, palm trees, and mud conflict with most stereotypical images of the Christmas season, seemingly provoking the irresistible urge to set out brash, non-biodegradable reminders of the holiday season.
Examples? A stubby—and slightly off-putting— 4’ mzungu Santa Claus figurine greets me with an electronic wave and a goofy painted-on grin outside the grocery store next to my favorite café. An ice-cream bike (yes, the Good Humor Man doppelganger in Tanzania works sans van, vending slowly melting treats from a bike-mounted cooler) rides by, emitting a shrill synthesizer version of the first two lines of “Jingle Bells” (the verse, not the chorus) on a persistently annoying loop. Strings of multicolored lights are everywhere, wrapped on trunks of palm trees along shop roofs, anywhere where there is electricity and spare disposable income. Even though I have no love for artificial plastic trees, the spirit was infectious, and I admit I was tempted to buy a small one here, if other Tanzanians hadn’t beaten me to it and bought the stores out. The Christmas spirit is alive and well here in Tanzania. We just have mud instead of snow.
Bre and Josh hadn’t executed any grand plan to decorate the house for Christmas, so they were surprised one evening to hear a loud thud outside followed by a car speeding off down the road in the dark. When they went out to investigate, they found a large loose evergreen tree had been lobbed over the gate, a last resort for delivery by our friend Paul after numerous efforts to rouse our guard from his slumber had failed. So the house was filled with the fresh scent of some unknown genus of evergreen, the look completed with a couple of 99-cent stockings from Target (as above, think garish/gaudy/China) brought by my husband Matt who came to visit me here for the holidays. And the highlights of my Christmas Santa bag, ferried over by my American Santa Claus/husband were beef jerky, Velveeta, stretchy headbands from Target, old shirts of mine that still smelled like laundry at home, a french press, old magazines, The Office on DVD, Skittles, nice-smelling girly things and a jar of pesto from Trader Joe’s.
Matt and I left Christmas Eve for Zanzibar – he had brought along a string of LED lights, which converted the palm in our room into a stunning Christmas tree (picture below). The hotel where we were staying in Stone Town (Zanzibar Town) had also caught the spirit, baking star-shaped cookies that said “Merry Cris” and “Merry Christas.” Even though Zanzibar is overwhelmingly Muslim (>95%), many people we passed wished us a Merry Christmas, as if sensing how difficult it might be for us wazungu to remember in such an exotic venue. But walking the narrow, dark streets of Stone Town, noting the faded splendor and Arabian influence in the ancient buildings, we found it strangely easier to imagine Christmas in Bethlehem than in America. It struck us as ironic how Christmas imagery is incredibly Western-centric (or perhaps Northern-centric, given the evocative association with snow), given that the Middle East two millennia ago hardly conformed to the Norman Rockwell or Currier & Ives stereotypes that come to mind during the Christmas season, even here in Tanzania.
Wherever you were for the holidays, I hope the spirit of the season depended on something much deeper than decorations or weather patterns. (A belated) Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!
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