Last year I was like a tourist at the station with the train schedule in his hand. I had been told that the Christmas Train arrived a little late in Armenia. The Orthodox Church had settled on January 6th instead of December 25th. "Problem chica," no problem, as they say here. I just needed to be a little patient and this special holiday would arrive a little late. As I waited during the two weeks prior to the Armenian Christmas, I did notice that the street decorations were a little sparse and the stores were missing that festive spirit. I wrote it off to the financial crisis Armenia was still recovering from. But then January 6th arrived and nothing happened. Christmas as I knew it never arrived. And like most confused tourists, I walked away from the train station shaking my head.
As I later discovered the date is not the only thing that makes Christmas in Armenia different. I was looking in the wrong place. The celebration here doesn't really show up in the stores, the streets, or even under a Christmas tree. The Armenian Christmas takes place around the family table. This year I was more prepared and had a wonderful time.
In fact, I even got a couple "warm-up" events as two of the young ladies I tutor had birthdays in December. And birthdays are like a mini-Christmas where the mothers get to practice their skills at stacking plates of food. It's not time to sit down to eat until the second tier of plates has been stacked on top of the first. For like Christmas, it is the sharing of a wonderful meal and not the giving of presents that is central to the celebration. And when the eating has slowed down, someone usually turns the music system up as loud as possible and the dancing starts. There is a real art to the hand movements for dancing in Armenia and one I don't expect to master anytime soon. But there are plenty of home-made fruit juice, wine, bottled water and Coke to keep the dancers refreshed. (For male celebrations you can also expect to find plenty of cognac and vodka.)
In America the holiday season gets started with Thanksgiving and is pretty much completed by New Years. Here, the season doesn't begin until January 1st, Nor Tari, and continues until January 11th. Their world of work stops and everything is set aside for visiting friends and relatives. This is not possible for some families that have been forced to relocate to Russia or Ukraine to find work. (One teen I visited hadn't seen his father for almost a year and a half.) For others, it means driving to a nearby town or just to the other side of their village.
This is also the time when your neighbors "drop in" at all hours. What might drive an American hostess to distraction is considered an expected part of Armenian hospitality. While we often prepare a rather large meal for Christmas Day, the Armenian families keep a banquet table ready with food for the whole week. No visit would be complete without toasting your guests with at least one shot of vodka. On New Year's Day one father "made the rounds" to his neighbors' homes and returned about an hour and a half later. It would a fair assessment to say he was "rather toasted" when he returned!
Having lived in Armenia for over a year now, I felt very much a part of the local network of relationships. I used part of the time to re-connect with some of the teens I worked with at camps last summer. I was also invited to spend a couple days living with various families. Remembering how much some of the children last year enjoyed the strange man with the white hair and beard, I chose not to shave for a couple months. Although I wasn't wearing a red suit or riding in a sleigh, many kids still thought I might be "Dzmare Papek" or Winter Grandfather as they refer to Santa here.
One family had these two little girls who decided it would be fun to comb out my beard. Their mother was a little embarrassed by their behavior but I found it a small price to pay for my ride this year on the Christmas Train. Being 7,000 miles from home, it was pretty sweet to be taken care of by a couple of Angels.
