No white christmas for us...

Merry christmas!!!

 

(classy!)

I'm feeling very festive and cheerful, especially since I have some company for the holidays.  I was a bit worried about spending christmas and new years on my own in Paraguay, especially since the vast majority of my informants and friends are with their families (many of which are in the "interior"...small-town Paraguay), so Ciudad del Este has rather emptied out for the holiday and is eerily quiet (and pretty depressing, actually).  Luckily, my classmate Mary Leighton decided that, like me, she wouldn't be able to fly back to home (she's from the UK, so it's an even more expensive flight, yikes!), so a tropical vacation in Paraguay was in order!  She is living in Santiago, Chile...so it was just a short regional flight to Asunción, and an afternoon on the bus to make it back to my apartment in eastern Paraguay (yay for putting my guest bedroom to good use!).  We decided that it would be nice to cook a big christmas meal, go all-out with festive decorations...and then plan a trip to the beach in Brazil for new years.  Aside from it being very, erh, seasonably warm here (summer) but not terribly seasonal for *my* sort of chilly christmas replete with eggnog, mulled wine, roast veggies, and rumbling radiators.  Having the air conditioning on full blast while traipsing around in our holiday finery (i.e. flip flops)...

So one of our first orders of business was to *finally* get some holiday decorations; I'd been talking about buying a christmas tree for ages!  Luckily, Paraguay is the sort of place that completely embraces kitsch, so procuring a 5' plastic christmas tree was pretty easy.  Schlepping a 5' long box through the very compressed and busy sidewalks of Ciudad del Este (along with $20 worth of gaudy plastic ornaments, santas, streamers, lights &c)...a bit more challenging.  But it made it home and we set up our little Charlie Brown tree in the living room--it was a little tipsy, but we didn't put anything heavy on it--and felt very festive.  Small stuffed animal stood in for the angel/star, some paper snowflakes and holiday streamers, and the house started to feel very much in the holiday spirit!

And to go with the christmas theme, Mary and I of course donned our christmas dresses--sun dresses, that is :)

So, christmas dinner.  Mary has a more well defined holiday tradition (as far as cuisine is concerned) than we do in the Schuster household, so I deferred to her menu choices and put my culinary skills to the test with a "proper English christmas," (or as close as we could come given the limitations imposed by availability of ingredients, and the rather rudimentary amenities of my kitchen).  So...first to Argentina to buy wine, champagne, and rum (for the christmas cake...and maybe some tropical rum cocktails, you know, the kind that should have little umbrellas and be served in a coconut), and then a stop in Brazil on the way back to buy a duck (fowl is the traditional christmas centerpiece) and about a pound of almonds (for the marzipan on the christmas cake...turns out that between some boiling water to blanch and peel them, my blender, and a lot of stirring...it's not too hard to make homemade!).  7 hours later we had procured all of our ingredients and made it passed three border checkpoints.  Mary's new passport looks a lot cooler now!


This is what a proper british christmas cake looks like:

And the menu consisted of roast duck with wine braised red cabbage and dried plum sauce (meat and dried fruit combination is traditional holiday fare...), roasted vegetables, and green beans.  We'll have leftover duck for awhile :)

And of course, the meal would not be complete without the flaming christmas pudding.  "We wish you a merry christmas, we wish you a merry christmas, we *wish* you a merry christmas and a happy new year...."

 

Feliz navidad!  I miss all of you terribly--hope that everybody has a wonderful holiday!