The Christmas traditions from Sweden to Jamaica

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): Come December and most shops are dressed up like a bride. From behind window panes packed with snow flakes or balls of cotton wool, Christmas trees both real and fake twinkle with colorful lights from a thousand bulbs, and are decorated with ornaments that glitter.

Sound systems everywhere play traditional Christian songs, while festive winds blowing around the globe connect people from Jakarta to Jamaica as the holiday season seems to hit all of humanity. Today it is possible to say merry Christmas in over a 100 languages.

However not everyone is charmed by Christmas. "Commercialism follows me where ever I go. Even here in Jakarta, everything is so artificial. I do not believe in putting pressure upon people to condense their goodness in one month during Ramadan or at Christmas. I believe in being good all the year round," says Luis Ruiz Arbeloa, economic and commercial counselor at the embassy of Spain. The counselor is making almost reluctant preparations to fly to Madrid for a forced family reunion to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ to whom he has not prayed ever since he left university nearly three decades ago.

"And I am not taking any presents for anyone," was Arbeloa's parting remark.

Despite the Spanish counselor's nonreligious and anticommercial views, most children in Spain will once again fill up their shoes with straw and wait for the Three Wise Men, especially Balthazar, to leave presents for them.

For it is not Santa who doles out gifts in Spain but the Three Wise Men who legend says passed through the country on their way to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ.

Santa, the human face of Christmas is actually Nicholas, a Christian leader from Myra in Turkey who lived in the fourth century AD.

He was so shy about helping others that one day he climbed the roof of a house and dropped a purse of money down the chimney that landed in the stocking of a girl who had put it by the fire to dry. And the rest of the Santa story, as they say, is history.

Back in Spain the spectacle of bonfires will once again be observed when crowds will hold their breath as people leap over shooting flames, in symbolic protection against illness.

And the feasting at Christmas Eve will be interrupted for a while when bells chime at midnight to announce The Mass of the Rooster. The most moving of all candlelight services is held at the monastery of Montserrat, high in the mountains near Barcelona and highlighted by a boy's choir singing in one, pure voice.

In Japan, Santa is called Kurohsu and it is little girls who are most excited about the birth of Christ as they love everything about babies.

Christmas became popular after the Japanese began making products for the festival for other countries. Today one of the most popular Christmas decorations in Japan is the origami swan. Christianity is not allowed in China, but about one percent of the population is said to be baptized, some of whom celebrate Christmas by attending the midnight mass and decorating artificial trees, called "trees of light", in upscale apartments.

In fact Christmas was once a movable feast celebrated many times during the year in different parts of the world in the worship of light, or the sun. It was the Pope in the fourth century AD who replaced Dec. 25, a day of pagan rituals concerning the Return of the Sun with the Christian one.

Before Christianity the Swedish people celebrated Christmas as mid-winter-blood with both animal and human sacrifices, appealing to the gods to release man from winter's cruel grip. It remains the biggest and longest holiday of the year when, according to tradition, Swedes make the trek to church, often by horse-drawn sleighs in the early hours of Christmas morning.

As food was scarce in the winter months, the entire celebration revolved around feasting with family and friends, like it does in Poland even today. In rural areas the Polish still believe that Christmas Eve is a night of magic when animals talk and people have the power to tell the future.

In eastern Poland, in just one of the many ceremonies, girls grind poppy seed in the hope of a quick marriage.

Getoniu Stere, 38, will not return to Romania for the holiday this year and nor will his ambassador. "We will stay in Jakarta and have our tree, exchange gifts among 25 other Romanians and feast together on our traditional cuisine, although there will be no slaughtering of the pig on Christmas, a ritual preserved by us since ancient times," Stere told The Jakarta Post. Stere has put up pictures at the embassy of the snow-clad celebrations in Romania to remind the staff of their mountainous home.

"I would be most displeased if for whatever reason I could not celebrate Christmas in Prague," said Milan Sarapalka, ambassador of the Czech Republic.

His wife and 12-year-old daughter have already left, and he looked forward to joining them a day after he spoke to this reporter. Unlike Asian families who are together all year round, Christmas is the only occasion when Sarapalka's family meets with each other.

Besides, he cannot imagine a Christmas without real snow and this is also the only time in the year when he visits the family church. The exchange of gifts is a symbol of peace and reconciliation with each other.

The Czechs like to have their traditional feast of fish soup, carp and potato salad at about 6 pm, while the Spanish do not eat until midnight, a habit they took with them also to their different colonies.

It was just six years after they arrived in Mexico that the first Mass of the Rooster was held at midnight and it quickly became very popular with the newly converted Indians.

To the already existing fiestas for the God of the Sun, local customs like fireworks, fruit punch and Indian dancing was added to please the Aztec Indians, traditions that continue to this day. Most Mexicans spend the last two weeks of December with the family and partying, while Christmas Day itself is an unearthly quiet day with everyone asleep and recovering from the night-long drinking and dancing of the previous evening.

In Hawaii, Christmas trees are delivered in refrigerated containers. If the island's limited supply of the grand fir tree runs out, the locals think nothing of decorating a palm tree for Christmas, while in Jamaica walls and tree roots are white-washed with temper lime using beaten banana stalks.

Grand markets in town squares play the rumba-box, guitar and saxophone, and after many rides on donkeys and the merry-go round people attend church and wear hats. It is important to make sure that all the elderly receive their special meal of rice and peas, along with home-made duck bread, convincing everyone that there is after all a little more to Christmas than just shopping.