"Christmas Storying with Mac"

My village is SDA, which means they don't celebrate Christmas. One person in my village is Catholic so she and her family were going up Mac's mountain to celebrate in a neighboring village so I followed them up to celebrate with Mac.

A few weeks ago we purchased a few bottles of wine, one at the request of Mac's dad, and the other 3 for Mac and myself. We had put them in our bags, making them very heavy and clunky. As we were coming back in the boat, my Dadi Andrew said, "Wow Nancy this is heavy. I think you have something for Christmas inside".

"Yup. I've got a big heavy book for Christmas inside."

So for the past few weeks he and his wife have been teasing me and Mac about our "Christmas book". The day before I went up, they say to Mac, "So you're going to do a lot of reading tomorrow," and pretend to flip pages in a book.

Keep in mind we haven't had Christmas books in awhile, so we're lightweights now.

On Christmas Eve, Mac and I read three big Christmas books in her hut in the mountains, with crickets and the creek softy talking outside. The first two were shared over really hilarious conversation about various things. We are at the point where we talk to each other in Bislama English. Or saying really ni-Van sentences that don't mean much but you just feel like saying it, like "I like dough".

At the end of the second Christmas book, we both really had to pee. Remember when I told you Mac's toilet is up a hill? Try walking up that hill, in the dark, drunk. I fell once, and then Mac fell coming out of the pit latrine. I became really Asian and pretended to take photos of us in a fallen heap outside the pit. We were laughing so hard, that the rest of the world seemed irrelevant.

The third Christmas book was split over watching "Love Actually", which we storied over until 2:30am.

Oh yea, this is important. Earlier that evening Mac's dad told us we had to be up at 3am to grate (scratch in Bislama)  taro and manioc for the laplap for Xmas.

We passed out, and I woke up once in a panic not knowing how I fell asleep antap of my sleeping bag, but not awaking again until 6am. Mac rolls over in her bed, looks at me with a wave of sickness, and says, "we missed the scratching".

"Why didn't anyone wake us??" I ask her.

We stumble out of her hut, terribly hungover. I ran up to the pit and puked, thinking to myself that the third Christmas book was probably not necessary. then we sheepishly made our way to her dadi's house.

"why didn't you sing out?", we ask her mom.

"well you two were storying until half past two last night that we just didn't want to wake you. You two just sounded so excited for Xmas that we wanted to let you sleep", she says, not upset at all.

Word spread fast. The rest of Christmas day, everyone came up to us saying "wow you two storied late last night!". And then her neighbor asks, "hey who fell down last night?" with a shit eating grin on his face. So everyone knew we stories until 2:30am and that someone fell down. Damn you, coconut wireless!

We went to church, and afterward the village had a goodbye ceremony for the priest, but it was ruined when a bunch of youngfala got wasted on yeast and started fighting. It was terrifying, as I've explained before that when niVans get drunk on yeast they go insane.

we went back to mac's brother's hut, where they were drinking beer and having a good time, not fighting like the other boys. But they kept trying to force us to drink, which I did not appreciate. It made me have a strange appreciation for my SDA village, where alcohol and kava are taboo.

The rest of Xmas was spent eating laplap and pig and cake with Mac's family. Mac and I gave each other funny looks throughout our Christmas dinner, laughing inside that this was indeed how we were spending Christmas 2010.

It was one for the books, that's for sure (no pun intended).

Sent from my iPod