It´s that time of year....

They tell me that Christmas is the hardest part of exchange. In this case, the ever-ambiguous "they" is my copy of The Exchange Student Survival Guide. It hasn´t failed me yet, and so I´m expecting this next month to be fun, but challenging. I´ve already survived the weirdest Thanksgiving of my life: 14 hours on a bus with the most substantial meal being a gas-station-ham-sandwich and no contact whatsoever with my family back home. Christmas will have to try really hard to be stranger than Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, I´m trying to emotionally prepare myself for the fact that this month will not be in the tradition of past Decembers. I think I can handle it, but we´ll see….

The purpose of this blog is to introduce you to my “advent calendar” idea. While I can´t promise cheap chocolates or witty limericks, I AM going to try to post every day leading up to Christmas. Yes, EVERY DAY. These posts will be short. They might just be a photo. They might explain a difference between an Anderson and a Rodríguez-Salomón family Christmas. They might be me whining. They might not even be related to Christmas at all. I´m not really sure, but it should be entertaining.

I am actually going to start today with a photo that doesn´t seem related to Christmas at all:

Those are all people from my country! Crazy! Getting to chill with a bunch of Americans (There were some that didn´t make it into the picture), was a super cool early Christmas present. It was so surreal to be surrounded, if only for a short time, by people who are learning to relate to this culture from the same point of view as me. I don´t know if that sentence made sense, but basically: We made friends very quickly.

In other news, tomorrow I am going to a Preposada. That means a pre-pre-Christmas dinner. Mexicans might be late to school, but every house on my street had its Christmas lights out before Thanksgiving. My friends started asking me if I felt the “Spirit of Christmas” around mid-November. People are STOKED. I am really looking forward to learning their new traditions, sharing familiar ones, and hopefully letting you all in on it too: Time to kick off December!