Cedar Falls Editor's Column: After Two African Christmases, Thankful for Family

Last Christmas, it was hot.

I wore capris and a tank top, fixed Christmas dinner outside on a grill and ate sitting on the porch under the sun. My friends and I made iced drinks with Amarula, a liquor made from Southern African fruit. We enjoyed having running water for our day in town. We reveled in American movies that most of our friends at home had already seen. They were brought by a volunteer who had just returned from a trip back to the land of high speed Internet. A few days later, we got on rickety public transport and took off for a week at the beach.

It was Christmas in Africa, Peace Corps style.

It’s kind of hard to beat spending the holidays on the beach, particularly a pristine Mozambican one, but I’m so glad to be home this year. Christmas in the cold (though not so much the snow, I guess) means Christmas with my family.

Cheesy? Yes. I hope you will forgive the overdone sentiment and bear with me while I revel in what is, to me, the reason for the season.

In Swaziland, where I spent the last two years as a community health education volunteer, Christmas looks very different than it does in Iowa.

The heat is the most obvious difference – it is the middle of summer in the southern hemisphere, after all. My community is also in a very dry part of the country, so the landscape was dusty and the greenery sparse, except for fields of verdant, irrigated sugar cane.

But beyond the conspicuous lack of snow, the biggest difference was that Christmas was much less hyped and commercialized than it is here.

Well-meaning Western charitable groups wrap and send Christmas boxes for African children – many of them arrived in my village, usually around April due to shipping and processing time – but rural Swazi children aren’t accustomed to being showered with Christmas gifts, so without those boxes they really wouldn’t realize they were missing anything.

The idea of hanging up your stocking and waiting for Santa to fill it was unheard of in my community – probably because almost no one I talked to had ever heard of Santa. He is a very European character. There was one Santa statue at a mall in the city, but he was something of a red felt and white fur-covered oddity.

Instead of gift exchanges, Christmas in Swaziland centered around eating and visiting friends and family. People in my community spent the day wandering from home to home, sharing food and conversation with their neighbors.

And it was the very thing, family, central to Swazi Christmas, that I truly missed while I was away. Not strings of sparkly lights or festooned trees, not Christmas music on the radio, frosted sugar cookies or colorfully wrapped gifts. I simply missed my family.

That’s all I want for Christmas this year, so I know even if I don’t get a single gift, I’ll be happy. Amidst the urge to spend and wrap and decorate, I’m glad for the perspective, easily voiced but easily forgotten, that I gained while away.