Tis the Season?

Christmas in Cambodia means redefining a lifetime’s accumulated expectations of this particular holiday. SNOW, Christmas music, Santa in the mall (the mall? What’s that?)— all gone— replaced by weather in the 80s, green leaves on the trees, flowers in bloom… I have to rub my eyes to believe the reality before me, which in no way resembles any conception of “December” I’ve previously had.

The good thing about Cambodia’s bearing no resemblance to Christmastime in the U.S. is it makes it fairly easy to delude myself into thinking it’s not really December at all. No holiday shopping? No 24 hours of A Christmas Story? Well then, it simply cannot be Christmas. Self delusion’s been working to an extent, but I’ve been forced into recognizing what season it is by random bits of Christmas popping up here and there: on the back of a student’s fuzzy red hoodie, for example, a fat, sequined Santa ho ho ho’ing: Merry Christmas! to all of Cambodia’s bewildered Buddhist community.

Explaining Christmastime to Cambodians is an inconceivable task. “You know, there’s snow in America right now.” Blank stare. I tried explaining how sometimes it gets so cold, your breath freezes. Of course, I didn’t have the vocabulary for this in Khmer: “It’s like…. When you breathe out….” One of my students offered, “There’s snow?” I liked this mental image so I went with it: America: Where it gets so cold, you breathe out snow.

A couple of nights ago at dinner, I tried again with my family: “… And then we put socks on the fireplace” (amazingly, there is a word for “fireplace” in Khmer—though I’m sure few have actually seen one—but not knowing it at the time, I drew one on the whiteboard). As I went on, explaining in broken Khmer this strange, consumerist, hazily Christian holiday of ours, I found myself thinking of David Sedaris and the rest of his french class trying to reconstruct Easter for a Moroccon student.

On I trudged: “Man, big, with fathermouth* color white, and long long, he enter into your house and he give you the presents. He put them under a tree, and he put sugar in socks of yours. If you are person bad, he give you—” At this point I dash to the back of the house to retrieve a piece of coal to illustrate my point. “—coal!” (I learned the word for coal is actually the same as the French word, which is handy: carbon). “We gives Santa cakes and water breast cow**, but we not never seen him.”

Interestingly, the Khmer New Year is, I guess, a lot like Christmas; there is a “god” (Santa) that comes to all of the good, law-abiding citizens’ houses to bring them good luck. Even though nobody’s ever seen him, you’re expected to leave out small cakes and plates of fruit to “give him energy” for his travels. The holiday’s in April and lasts for about a week or so—all the schools shut down and everyone parties. It does sound a lot like Christmas to me when you get right down to it, especially after my students and I established that Christmas is really just a “Christian party” (word choice courtesy of my students).

So, maybe I am not experiencing the holiday season as I have known it to be in the U.S., but it looks like I will get to experience much of the same sorts of festivities and traditions that make Christmas worth it anyway: the food, friends, family, and of course, relaxation (a practice, I must admit, Cambodians are much more apt at than Americans). Until then, I wish you a very happy holiday season, filled with love, overeating, and family.

"Christmas"

*beard

**milk