Dreaming of a White Christmas

The rain yesterday broke the humidity; today’s heat is dry and the sky is perfectly clear. I’m sitting in the Plaza de Mayo watching men on scaffolds put up Christmas lights in their wife-beaters. They are dripping sweat. I can only imagine that the little green and red lights, when they are finally all hung and lit, will clash with the Casa Rosada’s new coat of Pepto Bismal colored paint. Down many smaller streets near the Plaza in downtown Buenos Aires, lights are already strung over the traffic and have been there since the first of December.

The lights over Calle Florida, a pedestrian only street, remind me of the lights hung over Oxford’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, Cornmarket Street. However, while the Oxford lights lit scholars bundled up against the cold, their scholastic robes perhaps tucked up under a jacket, the lights on Calle Florida are at this very moment observing a group of students marching with flags towards the riot fence that divides Plaza de Mayo. I can’t tell what they are protesting—their flag reads “Martin Fierro” and they beat drums. In Oxford, Christmas settled naturally into early falling darkness; the lights, warm colors, and warm food all promised a needed relief from winter. Smells changed in Oxford for Christmas. There was more cinnamon and yeast. Here, though, Florida’s lights have to wait for the late setting summer sun and the smells seem to remain the same. As I walk down the street, I smell dough pockets filled with meat baking and feel the heavy sweetness that rises thickly off warm fruit.

Cornmarket and Florida actually do have a lot in common though, besides just being full of tourists who block the flow of people with their cameras and maps. Both streets are bustling shopping districts, both are main arteries of their respective cities. And at the moment, both are visibly transformed for the month of December, full of Christmas kitsch. Really, the most disorienting aspect of Christmas in Buenos Aires is how similar it looks. The sunburns and flip-flops merge with a Dickens-drawn expression of the Christmas season.

As a native San Diegan who has actually never passed a single Christmas day in snow or even cold, such a disjunction between the ideal of Christmas as a winter wonderland and the experience of it as summer should not strike me as odd. Yet it does here, and I think it is because Christmas feels like an American import. Not the spirit of the holiday, but its physical objects. In one window on Florida there is a reindeer family, dressed in red and green knit wear, dancing and skating, great electric powered puppets. In the bazaars, the front thirty feet is packed with Christmas ornaments, cards, tinsel, and an enormous variety of fake trees. Everything is eerily evergreen in the pressing humidity.

Argentines might object to this assessment; really, Christmas is a European import for our entire continent. And I have no doubt that when the actual day arrives, I will see the particular way in which Christmas is celebrated here. Klaudia tells me that they set off fire works and stay up late into the night on Christmas eve, enjoying the warm night with all of their family. I imagine that I will hear the sound of firecrackers across the roof tops of the city—Christmas will then seem like a Fourth of July that I remember, sitting on a hill in Nebraska, watching lights flicker across the city. No matter what I experience, it all seems to remind me of home.