Oh Christmas! What a wonderful and joyous time of year. The joy that is spread throughout the world must warm your heart with everyone having that great, traditional Christmas with jolly lights, festive love, decorative wreaths and Santa giving all the good boys and girls presents. What with most people annually absorbing the Christmas customs of the English and American nations, people tend to forget that Christmas includes a myriad of traditions celebrated around the world.
These customs include traveling early to morning church services on roller skates in Caracas, Venzuela. They also include Catalonian families geting a log, giving it a smiling face and a Christmas hat, feeding it fruits for a fortnight, and then on Christmas Eve beating it up with sticks and forcing it to excrete presents. Isn’t that a great way to start off the most jolly part of the year?
Guess what? That seemingly ridiculous tradition is real, and it’s not the only absurd one that is celebrated in our world.
Another is held in Norway, where it is believed that the night on which the evil spirits and witches come out and haunt the streets and alleys of towns is Christmas Eve; so on this night, they hide away all their brooms before going to bed. Men would fire their shotguns outside of their homes in order to frighten off the ghoulish creatures.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine and Russia, the Orthodox Church follows the Julian calendar, meaning that Christmas day for the Ukrainians and Russians is on January 7 for the rest of the world. Their Christmas traditions are quite intriguing, as they are said to fast during a 39 day period before Christmas Eve, and when the first evening star shines, a twelve-course supper is prepared in honor of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ.
While certain foods are strictly iconic to the Christmas tradition, cultures shall vary, and while cookies with milk may be associated with the Christmas of one culture, KFC is linked with the Christmas tradition of another. Indeed, Japan’s traditional Christmas dinner is Kentucky Fried Chicken, with a popularity so large that reservations must be made in order to dine there.
I think the greatest of all Christmas folktales and traditions is that of my dear old friend Krampus. He’s one of Santa’s little helpers, but instead of making toys for all the good boys and girls, he punishes all the bad ones. But hey, Krampus only dwells in Germany and Austria, so you might have squeezed by this time. But this loyal servant of Santa finally got his moment when a movie was made about him just this year –I guess he’s been a good boy.
The relevance of this information is greater than one might think. Knowing all this allows us to realize the diversity of cultures in the world we live in. It allows us to be unique amongst one another, yet at the same time it allows us to connect and respect one another’s traditions, because we probably have some unorthodox traditions that we think are regular in our own culture.
An Unorthodox Christmas
Mohammad Dajani and Hashim Dabbas