Is it snowing where you are? We’ve heard the weather gets cold this time of year, though our beach-filled weekends make it easy to forget sometimes. In the States, if I remember correctly, the air is crisp and cold. You can even see your breath floating away slowly as you scrape ice from your windshield. You get into your warmed-up cars and turn on the radio, which is either playing holiday music or urging you to take advantage of a million last minute sales. You drink things like hot apple cider or gingerbread lattes
and they warm up your hands. Everywhere you turn, there are red bows and green garland and twinkling, snow-covered lights. December is not very subtle in the States, is it?
Things are a little bit different around here. One day, we are comparing tan lines on a sunny beach and the next day…well, the next day, it’s Christmas. It sort of sneaks up on us. Don’t get me wrong, we try. We let Bing Crosby sing to us about White Christmas dreams, but he is usually interrupted by Bob Marley and his Three Little Birds. We rock around our mini-trees and make hot chocolate on our Coleman stoves. Our screened windows are lined with multi-colored lights, and many of us have found a place in our little tents to hang stockings. We dress up our tank tops with Santa hats and take a staff picture for the Maho newsletter. And on December 25th, the 60 members of the Maho staff sit down to Christmas dinner with 300 other people.
It might be a little less than traditional, but we are lucky enough to have a makeshift family of our own and persistent enough to inject as much holiday spirit into our coconut flavored lives as we can.
There are things that we miss, obviously. Personally, I am jealous of those gingerbread lattes. Also, snowball fights and red mittens. We miss our families and we think we miss snow days, though we probably wouldn’t feel that way were we to actually encounter one. But we have traded pine trees for palm trees and hot apple cider for cool Caribbean showers, and all in all, St. John gives us a pretty good December.
It may not quite feel like the holidays at home, but then the holidays at home don’t quite feel like Maho.
1 comment:
Well said------and we here in the snow-belt, while enjoying the smell of the wood fire, licking the snowflakes off our nose, getting together with family and friends, have in our thoughts our Maho friends, some of whom are lucky enough to be in that lovely place, some of whom are looking forward to returning to that lovely place,
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