Needless to say, this holiday season was a bit different from all my previous ones. It’s gone by in quite a blur though, to be honest. I think it’s safe to say that the phrase “time flies when you’re having fun” is appropriate here.
For simplicity’s sake, I’ll just go through chronologically. That means the first stop on Kelsey’s Hayastan Holiday Hoe-down begins with American Christmas – the weekend of December 25th. Conveniently, the Armenian school system has a winter break scheduled that generally starts towards the end of December. This year, it coincided perfectly with when us Americans typically celebrate Christmas. This meant that I could easily travel to visit with other volunteers, sans the guilt of missing school.
One quick note about that last week of school before I continue: it was the most ridiculous work week of my life. It started out normal enough, but as the days progressed, fewer and fewer students showed up. Now, I don’t just mean a couple absentees in each class. I mean there were only a few present students in each class. My counterpart and other teachers didn’t seem to bothered by it, saying that it happens every year. Students apparently get too eager for the holidays and don’t want to leave their warm homes. I mean, can you blame ‘em? In addition to the lack of students, halfway through the week, we started having shorter classes. Our class time had already been cut back from 45-minutes to 35, but this last week we operated on a 20-minute class schedule. By the end of this madness, I was ready to get out for a bit.
The first stop on my holiday travels was to the town of Sevan. There are a few volunteers placed here (both from my group and the previous one) who graciously offered to host a Christmas/Holiday get-together. Since there are so many of them placed in this town, it worked out really well. As far as I know, all 25 visitors had a bed or sofa to sleep on! I arrived on Friday evening and stayed through until Monday. Over the course of the weekend, we had a lot of good food, drink, and merriment all around. On Christmas day we did a Yankee Swap. I learned that this has different names depending on where you’re from – some other volunteers called it a White Elephant or Dirty Santa gift exchange. I ended up receiving a t-shirt from Egypt! (One volunteer had a friend visiting who’s currently living in Egypt). Not too shabby! All in all it was a good Christmas. I enjoyed having the company of other volunteers. I can’t imagine if I had been in my village on Christmas day; Armenians don’t celebrate Christmas on December 25th, so it would’ve been especially lonely. However, thanks to the camaraderie and hospitality of other volunteers, it was a fine holiday!
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| an Armenian priest & American Santa |
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| Santa Chris, me, and Grumpy Elf John at our Christmas party |
After American Christmas, I headed back to my village. I wanted to witness some of the infamous Armenian Nor Tari (New Year) celebration before departing on the most exciting part of my holidays. I enjoyed a few relaxing days around the house in the meantime. I also had the pleasure of attending an engagement party for a PCV and his Armenian fiancé! Leading up to and on New Year’s Eve, many of my extended host family members were at our house preparing food and cleaning. On the evening of the 31st, they began to set up an extravagant and beautiful display of food. A feast, really. There was chicken, all sorts of sausages, cheese, olives, fruit, tons of drinks, and so on. So the extended family (my host mom’s daughter and granddaughter, mostly) set up this beautiful spread and then what? Then they left. At about 10:30pm, they left to go back to their house. I was quite baffled by this at the time. I had assumed they’d be staying for the strike of midnight. All that was left in my house was my host mom and one of her sons. My host mom went to sleep, her son sat watching a variety show on TV, the feast sat on the table untouched, and I sat baffled. I stayed up for a little bit, reading guide books and trying to stay interested in the variety show. Eventually I ended up just going to bed. As I learned the next morning, the rest of the family returned at 2am for celebrations. I didn’t get the memo, and no one woke me up, so my New Year’s Eve was quite anticlimactic. In hindsight it was nice, since that extra bit of sleep helped me get over a cold I’d gained at the Sevan Christmas celebrations.
The following morning I departed (much to my host mom’s shock and dismay; she expected me to stay for more Nor Tari celebrations even though I had told her I was leaving). The other volunteers from my PST village and I had plans to go visit our PST families together on the 1st. So I met the volunteers in Yerevan and we departed from there. Going as a group was quite nice because we were able to easily visit all the other families without getting too stuck in one place. Each house had a beautiful table of food and drink ready for us. Seeing my PST family was great. I feel so at home with them, which I can’t say about my current host family. But at least I don’t live that far away and can visit relatively easily. The day of endless Nor Tari feasts ended where it began, in Yerevan. We all stayed in town that night. It made for an easy departure for me and Tom, who were off on our own, even grander adventure the next morning. But that deserves its own post.
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| a typical Nor Tari spread |
Until then…!
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