Sunday, March 8, 2009

Firecrackers, bonfires, and YELLOW

A short week after Christmas, it was New Year's, celebrated with a sleepover at Eloisa's house, MORE cooking--eating out is not so much a thing with these people, it's much more about the group experience of cooking and eating together in someone's home... amazing!--and funny noses.




















About Peruvian New Year's: it was one of the things I missed last year and really wanted to see, and I was not disappointed. Like Christmas, it's celebrated with a huge dinner at midnight. Unlike Christmas, families make scarecrow-like "dolls" out of old clothes and stuff bags with newspaper for their heads, and burn them bonfire-style on the street at midnight. It's supposed to symbolize burning the old year and old things in preparation for the new. (It's also a little freaky to walk around on December 31st and see these weirdly grinning scarecrows tied upright on people's roofs.) The sisters made one of these and burned it, but I wasn't there for the burning because I went to Eloisa's, and we didn't do one there.

I thought the firecrackers were bad at Christmas, but at New Year's it truly sounded like the whole zone was being bombed. There were little shooting-light ones that took off like anti-aircraft missles from the ground and made screaming noises like the laser shots in Star Wars, one after the other like gunfire. There were all kinds of whizzing lights and flowery exploding lights and some that just went BANG without lights at all... it's less of a visual show than US fireworks and more of a big chaotic chance for the entire neighborhood to go BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG at once. Between that and the ashes of burned effigy dolls smoking outside every house on the streets, Tupac truly looked like a war zone by 1 am.

The other big tradition of New Year's in Lima is YELLOW. Yellow is New Year's color, and for about the last three days of December the market explodes with vendors selling yellow decorations, beads, headbands, funny glasses, you name it--but especially yellow underwear. I don't know how many thousands of pairs of yellow underwear must have been on display on December 31st in that market. It's tradition to give yellow underwear as a present to friends for good luck. Magdalena and I went to buy a pair for everybody in the two communities, and certain nuns, I won't name names, were even seen wearing said underwear on their heads that night. :) I tried to be tactful in avoiding the granny-style panties that Magda was picking out for everyone, and choosing out my own reasonably cute pair... but unfortunately it was one size fits all, and as I'm much bigger than your average Peruvian woman, the underwear remains more of a souvenir than a part of my wardrobe.

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