Christmas in Cochabamba

No fifteen pound advertising inserts in the morning newspaper. No blaring TV or radio ads for last minute sales at Toys R Us for stuff that your kids just gotta have.

Young soldiers go door to door throughout the city, even up here in the boonies of the hillside where we live, collecting toys to hand out to the hundreds of poor families who have come here to the city from the countryside, and also the children who live with their parents in the jails. Mariana carefully scrutinizes her collection of stuffed animals and agrees with three she can part with. Goodbye Dalmatian with the oversized nose. The next day the city center is filed with the sound of dozens of Santa’s, disguised in plain clothes, giving these toys to really happy children.

In shirts sleeves on the evening before Christmas eve, families brave the gentle summer air to walk up and down the city’s tree-lined avenue, “el Prado” admiring the colored lights that the city has hung high in the trees, listening to the city chorus, and watching a performance artist in silver vinyl perform under oddly colored lights. An impromptu business has been set up offering people a chance to ride the short loop on horseback.

Traffic suddenly stops, as Mary arrives on the back of a burro, at the front of an entourage that includes Joseph, three (and potentially more) “wise men”, Roman soldiers, and an assortment of young women dressed like Mary each carrying their own Baby Jesus, as if the Prince of Peace had been cloned or something.

Tonight at midnight families will gather for the traditional dinner. As the clocks strike twelve, Cochabamba will explode in a barrage of fireworks set off from every corner of this valley. Roman candles, skyrockets, sparklers, massive firecrackers known here as Mata Suegras (which oddly translates into Kill your Mother-in-Law). Any firework of your dreams is available at a street corner stand near you. Picture nativity scenes mixed with the Fourth of July without anti-pyrotechnic laws and you pretty much have the scene. Here at my house, we are armed and ready.

Christmas in Cochabamba.