Feliz Navidad

In Venezuela, Christmas is a big holiday, especially with 96% of the population coming from a Roman Catholic background. However, Christmas Day is just like any other day, except that the stores are closed, and usually families go out and about. In the Puerto La Cruz area most people go out to the beach.

Christmas Eve is the big event. There is usually a dinner party with plenty of food, beer and/or blended scotch whiskey, and desert. The whole family gets together, and I'm not talking about just mom, dad, and children: Uncles, grandparents, second cousins, third cousins, great uncles; anyone who is related and lives nearby, basically. While adults sit and chat about all kinds of topics, kids run around and sometimes play with fireworks, which are used to celebrate Christmas/New Year's Eve and not Independence Day.

Decorations are typical: A Christmas tree that is usually a synthetic tree instead of a real pine tree, those usual red flowers and plenty of sparkle, lots of pictures of Santa Claus all over the place, and those red Christmas hats. There is also plenty of references to snow, and for some reason everyone thinks of snow and Christmas as the same thing, even though it only snows up in the high mountains near Merida. A lot of families create nativity scenes, too, and they can get pretty big; my grandmother created one once that took a whole wall! I think she won some kind of contest, too. Baby Jesus is added to the nativity scene at midnight.

There exist a dispute of who bring the gifts to the children: It's either Santa Claus, or San Nicolas, or the one and only Baby Jesus. When I was kid it was always Baby Jesus who brought me the gifts, but in recent years it seems that the middle/upper class has started calling this mystical creature Santa Claus (in English). So now the government, trying its hardest to promote Latin American identity due to the obvious subculture blend, is not allowing any images of Santa out in public places.