Christmas - 2 of 4

Christmas
page 2 of 4

One of the ways that someone in Yerevan celebrates the holidays is my putting a Santa hat on his sports car. An interesting thing that I have noticed while being here is that there isn't a widespread advertion to tackiness and kitch the way there is in the America. Like the wild lights on the Christmas tree in Republic Square. I've heard people remark at how pretty they are, but if a tree like that was downtown in an American city, everyone would find it gaudy. It also seems that clichés aren't shied away from here, I the more popular television shows and movies have well known, simple, and direct messages. Maybe it is because the population is more homogeneous and they are more willing to share their something. When there is a song that is popular, you hear it everywhere at the exclusion of everything else. Like there is this disco song form the 70s called "Sonny" by Boney M that they play everywhere all the time, but they don't play any other disco songs. They even had an Armenian-language version on a TV christmas special.

It is not a good thing or a bad thing, but just a different. Like the other ways Armenians lead they lives differently, they have a different set of aesthetics here.

Western Christmas Day (i.e. December 25th) was a day like any other in Yerevan. But a bunch of us American Armenians got together for a Christmas party to try and recreate a bit of holiday cheer. We ate crepes with nutella and did a gift exchange. I got an ABBA greatest hits CD, which I made everyone listen to Mama Mia all night long. To give, I brought one of these kids fishing games. When we played I was the champion, but I had practiced at the toy store. That's Armineh on the left and Hayk on the right busy competing for best fisher.

My friend Rachel brought boxing gloves. Someone else got them, but we all played with them. They were a hit! Ha ha! Get it?

I beat up my friend Armen. He was on Birthright, but he got a job and actually lives and works here now. He's an animator and is working at two jobs: one is designing a ciriculum to teach kids to use computer animation tools, and the other is working on a feature length Russian computer animated film.

We also played a game called Mafia, which is a party game. There are 3 or 4 "Mafia" and the rest of the player are "Townspeople" and they try and kill each other off. But the "townspeople" don't know who the "mafia" are and so it turns into a witch hunt. Local Armenians are REALLY into this game (Armenians like to get into things collectively), they even have clubs to go play at. We played three or four rounds. Everyone got worked up and excited! Then everyone went home.

The night before New Years eve, I went to a performance of what traditional Armenian Christmas' were like in the villages before all the cultures of the caucuses got mixed together. An anthropologist did a lot of research to figure it all out, and then all these adorable children put on a performance for us! I didn't understand the words it because it was in Armenian, but it was simple and easy to follow. They did a lot of singing and dancing and eating.

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