oh christmas tree, oh christmas tree

So its almost Christmas. I intellectually understand that this is true, even though every time I look out my bedroom window and see the palm tree (the one that sometimes looks like a dinosaur) I can’t quite believe it. But I have moments. Pretty much only when I’m inside some air-conditioned place (like the supermarket or Little America) and the Christmas Carols are blasting, which they are often, and I can’t actually see outside to the green, green city of Colombo. Then sometimes I can imagine that it’s Christmas time. This only cements my knowledge that I shouldn’t ever live in California. Or the South. What does Christmas even mean without snow? I just don’t understand.

We’ve tried, though. We have a tree in our house – we call it our Charlie Brown Chrismas Tree, which is a cultural reference I recently tried to explain to a Swedish dude, and realized I’m not even sure exactly what its from. I mean, Peanuts, obviously, but beyond that, I’m not really sure. We bought this tree from the plant market down the road, so its live and in a pot, and I don’t know what kind of tree it is, but it almost looks like a pine tree. Sort of. But we went and bought tree decorations from Arpico (the Wal-Mart of Sri Lanka, conveniently walking distance from our house). Arpico is one of the places where it feels like Christmas, just because of the sheer volume of Christmas decorations that they have there. You can stand in an aisle and look down a looooong aisle with fake pine bough-arches and red bows the whole way down. Once, sometime in November, Leah and I were doing just this. We were trying on the Santa hats and singing raindeer antlers (of which I now own a pair), and possible dancing (and definitely singing) to the Christmas music. It may have been about 10 in the evening. One of the men who works there walked by the aisle, saw us, kept going, then did a full on double take, turned around and came back to look at us again and immediately cracked up.



Anyway, this is our tree (and my roommate Leah). We like it (and Leah), although we only turn the lights on for about 20 minutes at a time, or if we have guests, because electricity is so expensive here. Christmas cheer must be sacrificed. I think we’re going to have dinner here on Christmas, and a hot chocolate Christmas Eve-ning. We’re not sure about food yet, but I think we’ll be able to make pretty much everything that we want – you can get a lot of American foodstuffs here, but the real problem is that anything imported is insanely expensive. I do miss cheese, but not enough to pay 8 dollars for a small sliver of gouda. Well, I don’t miss it that much YET, anyway. Every time I go to the big grocery store I cave and buy something that is not actually worth the price. Sometimes its chocolate. Once I bought Philadelphia cream cheese. Mmmmm.

I’m actually writing this from Little America, because our internet is currently down. Little America is what I’ve taken to calling the coffee shop down the road. A friend (Canadian, actually) called that that once, and I love it. I’ve been to a lot of posh places in South Asia, but there’s something about this place that is more specifically American than pretty much any other place in South Asia I’ve been. It’s not just that its posh – though it is that. You can get a real brewed coffee for almost 3 dollars, and they have good cheesecake, but its not that either. It may be the preponderance of expat families – blond children running around everywhere. But my current theory is that its actually the fact that there’s a separate bar for the sugar and little wooden stirrers. I think THIS is what makes it Little America. Proper studies have yet to be done, but my informal surveying has found positive reaction to my theory.