Christmas=Food!

Christmas means food and lots of it!

On Christmas Eve Boris and I headed out for dinner with a bottle of wine a friend had brought us from France a few months back. It was time to celebrate, yet neither of us felt like it was Christmas. Maybe it is the fact that it is 25C everyday that threw us off! At the restaurant there were Christmas lights twinkling all over, so we started to get into the spirit. We ate chicken, closest we could get to a turkey. They do have turkey’s here, but they would likely serve us the whole thing and as two it seemed a little too big!

After dinner we returned home over fed and feeling like maybe it could be Christmas after all.

Most people here go to Church on Christmas Eve and the church behind our house had decided that it was indeed Christmas and the celebration was in full swing. Tam tam’s were beating and people were singing! At first it was charming and we started to feel like celebrating too, then by 6am while the tam tam’s were still beating, and our heads as well, we woke up to the warmest, driest Christmas I have ever had.

We spent the morning at the market, with everyone else, scurrying to buy vegetables and meat. We had invited some friends over to eat and we wanted to make something special. We decided to make Moroccan style lamb with honey, dates and raisins. Who would have thought it would be so hard to find Cinnamon and Cumin, and how it is even harder trying to describe it especially when the woman speaks Dioula and you french. In the end we found all that we needed and returned home to start the cooking frenzy. Once all was ready friends arrived for an experience very different from anything they had ever seen before. We kind of pushed their culinary boundaries to new frontiers and it was pretty funny seeing their reactions to sweet meat. But our friends were willing to try it and open to new ideas.

We then packed up some pots with food and headed out to visit friends. Here on Christmas you go around all friends and family, to pass on your best wishes and to talk and eat. Every where you go people have prepared so much food and you are fed a full meal in each house. By the time we reached our last friends house (5 houses on our tour) we had already eaten 5 full meals in a few hours. We ate again! At this point my shirt seemed to shrink size and I could hardly breath it became so tight!

There is a story here that parents tell their kids about a spirit that comes in the night of festivals and that picks up the kids while they sleep. If a child is too light, hasn’t eaten enough, then the spirit takes them away. Basically this is a way that parents make sure that their kids eat what they are served when they visit friends and family so as not to waste the food. A friend of mine told me that when he was little he was so afraid of this spirit that he would eat so much that his stomach would hurt for days. I also started to understand the feeling!

All in all Christmas was fun. Lots of food, laughter and friends!