Honduras being a predominantly Catholic country and all, you definitely see less focus on Santa Claus and way more where it belongs: on fireworks.

Yes, that’s right, Christmas cheer is spread here by means of miniature bombs tossed from the porches and hands of 5-year-old kids. And then the bigger kids get down to business around midnight on Christmas Eve to say, “Jesus, thank you." KA-BOOM!!

But really, Christmastime here is quite interesting. I gotta say, I don’t miss for a minute the repetitive Christmas songs of back home. I mean, how many times can Jingle Bells really be covered before it becomes redundant? Just sayin’. If you love those Christmas songs, I’m sorry…for your bad taste. Haha! Ok, I guess it helps I’ve never celebrated Christmas, so for others I suppose they could have special meaning, but really, is that all they must play in December? Ok ok, I’ll stop being offensive and return to the topic at hand! Christmas in Honduras. Quite different actually. They do do their best to mimic North American Christmases, and yes I just wrote “do do" in a sentence completely unrelated to dog poop! You’ll see Christmas trees (which are very popular in this part of the country), snowmen built from plastic cups, images of Santa, and a very popular mini nativity scene in the park. Unlike back home however, not everything is shut down by Christmas eve. It’s just as busy downtown (well, in a relative sense) here as it is back home, but the evening gets busy in the neighbourghodds as the faithful do their darndest to blow Santa outta the sky! I don’t know if the goal is to knock a present or two out of that giant bag he carries or what, but I suppose since there are very few chimneys on the houses here, Santa would be quite confused as to what to do in such a situation without his magical entranceway to stalk every family on the planet! It also makes you wonder if the Hondurans have it right, and some rogue copyist had decided to change the Bible account of angels heralding the birth of Jesus by lighting “crazy amounts" of fireworks to something a little more tame like shocking a few shepherds with an impromptu song, as we read in the Bible today.

New Years’ Eve is another popular time to keep the neighbourhood awake by living out pyrotechnic fantasies. The Hondurans don’t disappoint. I wonder if gangsters use these evenings as convenient times to shoot up their opponents, or if they’re likewise busy blowing more trivial things up. In any case, if you were to want revenge on someone here, and wanted to make it an early Christmas gift to yourself, well, now you know when to do it. But then, that seems to betray the “Christmas spirit"…hmmm…insert “Thinking Face" emoji here…

Well, now that the dust has settled, the smoke has cleared, the gunpowder smell lingers. As do incredible amounts of littered smithereens of newspaper that were used in the homemade (quite literally) fireworks. We have now moved into our new Kingdom Hall we had been building in the lower part of the city. If I haven’t already explained, Santa Rosa is situated on a group of mountains. The historical centre is on one, and we live on that level. Much of the newer city is located about 50 metres lower. Needless to say, GOING to our semiweekly meetings is hardly a chore: gravity is quite useful. However, it’s coming home that’s a challenge, gravity becomes the enemy. Up till now it hasn’t been too bad, it’s been “winter" in the most un-Canadian sense of the word. Nevertheless, for here it’s winter, and so the cooler air makes the hike more bearable. But as we move towards summer (March-April), the heat makes it more of an exercise.

Speaking of explosives, I may as well recount a somewhat embarrassing story. You know how sometimes you hear a sound outside, and when you go to investigate, you are most certain you see a bullet hole? No? Never had that? Oh…well anyways, it’s a little disconcerting. Especially when, if the “bullet" had been a little higher, it could have come in a window and right at you. Now, there’s nothing like crying wolf when you really think there’s a wolf. And I admit, I did. I was onstage at the Kingdom Hall when I heard a sound of something hitting the wall (I thought it hit the door, but the metal door should have sounded off like a drum). When I could, I went to investigate outside, leading me to what I thought looked awfully like a bullet hole. After the meeting ended, some of the others took a look and agreed, though we couldn't find any other evidence and few had heard the sound. Still, we alerted others, and action was swift as some from the maintenance committee of the Kingdom Hall talked about calling the police. But first it was decided to call the Central American Branch Office in Mexico. Now, the one thing we should have checked that night was where the emergency exit door, which is in that wall, touches the wall. Because if we had, we might have noticed something rather coincidental about the location of the “bullet" hole and where a doorstopper is supposed to meet the door. You see where this is going. Yes, rather than some menacing hooligans trying to do away with yours truly, some mischievous hooligancitos must have been playing out there the night before, and perhaps because of embarrassment, neglected to inform anyone of the doorstopper they broke off the wall, leaving a hole in the concrete where a plastic insert would have been cozying up to the screwed-in doorstop. [Insert “Rolling Eyes" emoji here.] Anyways, the next day I went again, and there was the doorstop sitting on the windowsill above the hole, where the night before I had risked my life to talk about King Hezekiah. Ha! Since the night before we were scouring the ground for evidence of a bullet, no one obviously thought to check the windowsill for anything! So what had made us a little worried, ended up being something to chuckle about in the end: I’m fine, the Hall is fine, but I tell ya, if ever I get my hands on the hooligancito that did it, I’ll tell him about Jesus the way a Honduran knows best: KA-BOOM!! (Just kidding, of course!😜)