Tag Archives: christmas

Bah, Humbug!

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When did Christmas get to be such a chore?

I’m so tired of the hoopla and craziness that comes with the season, so much so that I just can’t seem to find my Christmas spirit this year.  Bah, humbug!

It’s been a tradition for my family (me, hubby, and kids) to put our trees up right after Thanksgiving but that didn’t happen this year and it was mostly because I just wasn’t in the mood for it.  In fact, we just barely put up our Christmas tree last night and only after our youngest kept asking about it.

Speaking of trees, I also used to decorate two 8ft Christmas trees, one in the living room, one in the family room, a smaller one in the game room, not to mention all the other decorations both indoors and outdoors.  Was I a nut or what?

This year, my only nod to the season as far as decoration is the one Christmas tree.  Not even doing Christmas cards this year, actually what I should say is I’m not even going to pretend to do cards this year.  Every year I buy a fairly expensive box of cards but then just never get around to actually writing and sending them off so somewhere in my basement are a dozen or so boxes of Christmas cards that have survived all the pcs moves.

The season is getting so tiresome for me that I don’t even like listening to Christmas music anymore.  Come on, they started playing them way before Thanksgiving so by the time Christmas comes around I’ve had it up to here with Rudolf and I too am ready to kick Santa off the roof like the Best Buy Game On, Santa commercial.  Incidentally, read somewhere that others think these Best Buy commercials are callous.  To that I say, go get yourself a sense of humor buddy cause I think they’re clever and funny!

Rest assured, I’m not going to be a Scrooge this year or any other year if I can help it. I’ve no intention of being cheap when it comes to my kids but I won’t be going overboard either.  They’ll still have a pretty good Christmas. Mind you, they did get all their big ”presents” on black Friday and if you know me then you know there’s no way I can wait 4 whole weeks to give it to them so we’ll still have Christmas but it’ll be simple.  It’s all the other stuff that we do during the season that I’m so done with.

I’m really liking the scaling back and simplifying the holiday thing so this is going to be our new Christmas tradition.  Finally saying enough is enough to all the commercialism that comes with the season.  It’s not about the flashing lights or the best decorated tree or house, it’s about people.  In keeping with that spirit, we’re going to celebrate the season by doing some fun things with our boys and by doing a family service project this Saturday.  We’re looking forward to it and we’re really hoping that it’ll be a memorable experience for our family!

So to all our family and friends that are reading this, know that we love and  appreciate you all but don’t expect a plate of fresh baked cookies this year, ok??

Now that you all know how unmerry I’m feeling about the season let me now wish you all a wonderful holiday season and an even better new year.  Thank you all for reading my blog and I hope you’ll continue to do so next year.

Manuia le Kerismasi ma le Tausaga Fou!  Alofaaga from my family to yours.

Trick-or-Treat

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Now that I’m stuffed with candy and all that good stuff I’m ready to make up for the last few days.  My goal was to post something at least every other day, obviously I’ve failed miserably.  Anyway I just got back from trickotreating with my 8 year old.  My 15 year old said he was too old to go trickotreating anymore so I had him stay home and give out candy and hubby was just too tired from work so he held down the couch for the evening.

Trickotreating tonight made me think about how we celebrated certain days in Samoa.  Of course we never celebrated Halloween in Samoa, at least not in my village and not when I was a kid.  I know that there are villages in Samoa, especially in American Samoa, where one can go trickotreating and actually have families who are ready with candy.   But back in the day in my little village no one I knew in my age group had even heard of Halloween. 

Can you imagine if a family in Samoa at that time gave out candy just because it was a certain day of the year?  I can just see the line of people, it would have stretched clear to the end of the village and probably on to the next.  I can also see the lo’omakua okeing when they ran out of candy.  She would probably say something like, “ia va’ai mai a ua leai gi lole ae kou saga kuku mai lava.  O ia i kou aiga.”

Boy, what a sight it would have been.   And us kids would probably never even see any of the candy that we’d collect.  We’d have older kids on us in no time at all and what about everyone else that will aisi for a little bit of our candy.  How many times  have you had to bite a candy in two so that you can give the other half to someone else?  Quite a few times in my case when I was a kid.  I can remember literally biting into a hard candy and taking both halves out and then examining them clearly to make sure they were even.  And then, I would eat the other half and my friend would have the other.  It might have been the half that was in my mouth to begin with but neither of us cared.  What’s a little saliva slobbered all over it, small sacrifice for a taste of candy.   We never saw chocolate bars when we were kids, it was an unheard of luxury at the time.

What about Christmas?  Christmas is just around the corner and we will once again go out and buy way too much stuff.  Back in the day if I had one balloon I was happy.  If we had marbles boy we were the envy of all the other kids in the village.  Oh and those noise makers that you can get at the dollar store.  I remember having one of those one year and I kept blowing it and blowing it and probably drove everyone around me crazy but I felt as if I’d been given the most expensive gift in the world.

Oh and the big finale, the firecrackers!  Yeah, right.  What firecrackers?  Never even saw any until I came to the States.  We did have faga ofe’s though.  I can still see the older boys in the village sitting down with those big bamboo poles smelling of kerosene because that’s what they needed to light it so it can make that big bang.  Oh, and the food.  The food was always good.  Some families were lucky enough to have kalo, palusami, and sapasui.  Some were even luckier to have pigs and they would roast one for Christmas and then all the rest of us would wait and hope that they would give us an alaga or something.  More often than not we would get something from all the other families around us and we would always share whatever special meal we were having that day. I remember we had a lafu moa so we could always count on at least having supo moa for Christmas. 

I have some palagi friends who live on farms and raise chickens and they tell me that they don’t eat their chickens because they feel like they’re eating a part of the family.  Boy, I never had any such qualms about chowing down on our chickens.  I not only ate the meat but we would kugu the faku and all the other parts as well.  It’s not as if I didn’t have anything to do with raising the chickens.  I did.  I remember going out after school with my bowl of rice, sayin ku..ku…ku.. and all the chickens would come running so I was very much involved with our chickens.  I wonder what my friends would say if I tell them that I not only ate our chickens but I also helped fuki the fulu off them before we cooked them? 

Ah, the good old days.  Life was so much simpler then, wasn’t it?  We didn’t have much but we were happy.  And the funny thing is, we never even knew we didn’t have all that much.  Looking back now I realize what little we had then but back then when I was little I felt as if I had everything that I needed in life.  That says a lot for our way of life in Samoa, we may not have a lot in material means but what we do have a lot of is aiga and alofa and I’ll take that over anything else any day of the week.