A most totally bitchin' Noche Buena

For many of us who grew with some tension in the familia, Christmas can be a mixed blessing. It's supposed to be this time when we celebrate home and hearth and togetherness and all that, but sometimes that togetherness just isn't there. And in the US there's such a build-up that many people can't help but be disappointed.

My mother frequently had meltdowns on Christmas. I sometimes say that my least favorite sentence is "This is going to be the best Christmas ever!" A sure sign that we were in for trouble.

So I was happy to be here in Buenos Aires for the holiday season. It was very much part of the plan, actually, to skip the season in the US.

I didn't have to worry about what i would do here, because I luckily have a ready-made set of ex-pat friends, and they arranged to have Christmas dinner together. They celebrate on Christmas Eve, la Noche Buena, rather than Christmas day, La Navidad. So we had a nice christmas dinner together. I will try to write about that elsewhere.

But the fun really happened out in the street. It turns out that the way they celebrate the blessed moment of the birth of the son of God is to go out into the street and blow shit up. Okay, really they're setting off fireworks. And some of them are beautiful sparkly things that light up the sky:
The above actually has a name -- it's D'Artagnan. Our friend Mark Burton went to the Jumbo (a kind of Argentinian Wal-Mart) and bought these very posh fireworks for our entertainment. And maybe also to avoid being shown up by the neighbors. I think he did succeed in getting the most visually impressive fireworks:


The tradition is to start the show at midnight, and Mark lit the fuse pretty much on the dot. D'Artagnan burned very brightly, but alas very briefly. But we had no shortage of entertainment out on the street. Things were going off on all sides, actually. One block over was a big open intersection, a place where lots of people were setting things off:
This was just too great. One after another, guys (always guys) would go into the street and light something off. And sometimes they would just toss things out, giant firecrackers. But one person in our group thought that some of them were homemade, like small pipe bombs. And bomb was the word for some of them, seriously loud, setting off the car alarms. For about 10 minutes it did feel something like a war zone, explosions going off on all sides of you.

No question, there's something very exhilarating about that chaos and sense of destruction, something very primal. It's an instinctive male thing, to go into hyper-alertness in the middle of battle (or mock battle in this case). I'm generally as weeny as they come, neurotically avoiding conflict whenever possible, but I understand the attraction of the battle.

But fortunately it wasn't just explosions. If it were there probably wouldn't be a single female out on the street. But there was lots of prettiness as well:

Unfortunately I couldn't get a picture of the prettiest thing of all, the floating lanterns. These are some kind of paper lantern with a small candle or flame inside. The hot air from the flame makes the paper lantern float across the sky like a hot air balloon. I only saw one, but it was a very ethereal sight -- like a glowing bag made of tissue paper being carried by the wind slowly across the sky. If you are lucky enough to have a good vantage point you might be able to see 10 or 20 or more of these floating across the sky. Really lovely, a beautiful sight, if not the visceral rush of the homemade pipe bomb.