Palauan Christmas

Despite having grown up in California and thus having no particular emotional needs for a white Christmas, I approached the holiday season with a degree of disbelief and detachment, thrown off by the tropical weather and lack of neatly sectioned semesters and official winter break to signify the onset of festive sentiment. Were it not for the holiday light displays that promptly illuminated the entire town of Koror the night after Thanksgiving I would have hardly accepted the reality of December at all.

The (still surreal) celebrations started with PICRC's Christmas party on the 20th, which reunited present and past employees and board members. After dinner and a cultural dance performance from a visiting group participating in a coral reef sustainability training course, they set up the "band" (a synthesizer and a microphone, just as with the first birth ceremony) and everyone sang and danced for the rest of the night. The playlist consisted of four or five Palauan songs interspersed with the Palauan version of "Feliz Navidad" (in English/Spanish, but with island rhythms) on endless shuffled loop, and, just after midnight, one inexplicable rendition of 'N Sync's "Pop" before the immediate resumption of the original mix. Afterward, a stalwart group of celebrators went out for karaoke, a favorite Palauan pastime. From what I've heard so far, Palauans uniformly have amazing singing voices and a penchant for Rod Stewart's "I Don't Want to Talk About It." 

My host family's kids--Sasha, 20, and Oki, 16, are home for the holidays, and on Christmas day the whole family went to a beautiful Palauan Catholic church service. The familiar carols were sung entirely in Palauan, but I could hum along for a few "Glorias." Afterward, we exchanged gifts--they presented me with a t-shirt advocating the prevention of underage drinking and drug abuse, which, although I'm unsure exactly what they were suggesting, I will henceforth wear proudly.  

My host mom, Zabeth, arranges presents under the tree on Christmas Eve.

I fear that my host family is skeptical of my usual evening alibis of "reading," "going to bed before 10pm," and "being over 21."

We spent the rest of the day at my host mom's father's house for a luncheon with her extensive extended family. In addition to turkey and taro, they served Palau's signature delicacy, fruitbat soup. The soup is prepared with a whole (literally whole: skin, wings, and all internal organs intact) bat in each bowl, and is served on special occasions. Hesitant to tackle an entire bat of my own, I sampled some of my host mom's, and will admit that the meat was flavorful and tender. The afternoon and evening progressed with the other major Palauan pastimes: chewing nut and talking story, while I, bested even by the toddlers in Palauan language communication abilities (I recently added "See you later" to my vocabulary, to complement "Good morning," "Thank you," and the names of several species of edible sea cucumbers), sought out more compatible interlocutors in infants. My newest Christmas traditions are watching "Spongebob Squarepants: the Movie" and the "Fairly OddParents Christmas Special" while playing rousing games of peekaboo.  

I failed to bring my camera to lunch, but here is a particularly elegant example of fruitbat soup from Google Images. We dined on the purist's recipe: just bat in broth.