While almost all of my expat colleagues went back to Europe, North America, or warmer climates for Christmas and New Year’s, I had decided months ago to stick around Central Asia. Circumstances kept Heidi here as well and we busied ourselves by working until the 24th, preparing a 15-person Christmas feast for our Tajik family with two other expat friends, and then spending a week holiday in Kyrgyzstan after a bit more office work.
Since 90% of the population of Tajikistan is Muslim, I was by no means expecting anything to do with Christmas. However, in the weeks preceding December 25th, I was surprised to see banners and decorations of staple holiday symbols springing up around the city. I soon learned that they were for New Year’s, not Christmas: the evergreen trees decorated with garland and flashing lights and topped with stars were actually New Year’s trees; the jolly old man in red who looked suspiciously identical to Santa Claus was in fact Bobo Barfie (literally, Grandfather Snow). I couldn’t help but think that the amusing adoption of traditional Christian symbols was catalyzed more by the permeation of cheap Chinese products on the Tajik market than the desire to usher in the New Year with Bobo Barfie. Regardless, it made shopping for ‘Christmas’ decorations for our room significantly easier than anticipated.
Thanks to the timely arrival of packages from my parents sent a month prior from Canada, we were also unexpectedly treated to the luxuries of Kraft peanut butter, Christmas music, candy canes, and Pop Tarts. On my way back from a work trip in south-western Tajikistan on the 23rd, I picked up a fresh turkey for Christmas dinner*, which we managed to cook successfully in a Russian toaster oven. A formidable group effort produced a feast of home-made stuffing, biscuits, mashed potatoes, roasted carrots, butternut squash soup, pies, and pomegranate-apple sauce (a brilliant substitute for cranberry sauce, courtesy of Heidi). We weren’t sure how the new menu would go over with our Tajik family, but we joked that they must have loved everything, for the only thing leftover was the naan (which would otherwise never have been left uneaten).
We also had small gifts for the whole family. Four-year old Ibro volunteered to be our elf and help distribute the presents, but then insisted on opening each one in front of the true recipient. Like most small children and puppies, however, he was more interested in the wrapping paper than the contents (until he came to his own, of course).
Even though I wasn’t with my biological family, I was thrilled to spend an otherwise traditional Christmas with my current live-in family in Tajikistan and a rather non-traditional New Year’s in Kyrgyzstan with two of my closest friends (separate post coming soon).
* Even this normally lacklustre activity was a memorable experience, as with pretty much everything in Tajikistan. After a long day of interviewing farmers about a new approach to agricultural extension, I was driving back to Dushanbe with work colleagues when I remembered the gaggles of turkeys pecking around the open fields and mentioned that I’d like to buy one (dead, preferably; I’m too fond of the live ones to carry out the deed myself). We pulled over to a cluster of road-side ‘stalls’ of plucked birds strung up in trees by the legs. My driver told me to stay in the vehicle to avoid an immediate price hike and let my interpreter do the talking. A rather diminutive and dainty-looking Tajik woman, she had me in fits of laughter as she haggled with the turkey farmers with an unexpected ferocity, incessantly demanding a reduction of a mere 5 Tajik Somoni (less than $1.50 CDN). The more she argued, the more farmers joined the scrum, holding up turkey carcasses and shouting prices like stockbrokers on Wall Street. We wound up with a 5 kg specimen for 50 TJS (less than $15 CDN).
