Christmas in Costa Rica

With only a few days to go before Christmas, I decided that I needed to celebrate, so we bought a turkey and invited some friends to the house. Jack unearthed boxes filled with lights, tree ornaments, decorative bows, candles, ceramic angles and Christmas music, which we played loudly as we dug through the boxes and strung lights on the porch fence.

Lights on the porch fence

On Christmas Eve, I made roasted carrot and fennel soup and started the rye bread. Considering the fact that our plan was last minute, everything seemed to be working smoothly.

Jack strings lights

On Christmas morning, I jumped out of bed at six, eager to begin, only to discover that we had no water. But I wasn’t alarmed, because there’s a pump-house about 30 yards from the house where we can flip a switch to turn it back on. The switch didn’t work, so I called Oldemar, the neighborhood man who manages our rental, and he came over to look at it.

Oldemar called Jose Louis, the electrician, who obligingly left his house on Christmas to examine the two circuit breakers and various other parts required to pump the water from the well. I began to feel slightly anxious. Eight people were coming over for dinner at four, there was already a mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen, and we had no water. I wondered if I should start calling my friends, but I hoped for the best.

Jose Louis left, and returned with an armload of electrical replacement parts.
“Can you fix it?” I asked, in my baby Spanish.

“Yes,” he said, smiling encouragingly, so I returned to the house, baked the bread, stuffed the bird and popped it into the oven. The stack of dirty dishes kept growing, and that began to alarm me, but I stubbornly still hoped for the best.

“At least we can still get water from the pump-house hose,” said Jack , so I decided to attack the chore of cleaning up the kitchen, but he came back with the bad news: no more water in that hose, either. The thought of the gallons of water we’d need to haul here to wash and rinse the dishes began to gnaw at me. “We can’t do this without water,” I said, “but he’s not finished yet, so lets wait a bit longer.”

When Jack wandered down to the pump-house, Jose Louis was leaving. He had found, though the process of elimination, that the problem wasn’t electrical. The pump needed to be fixed, he thought. He doubted that repairs would start before Monday—three days away.

We admitted defeat, and reluctantly called our friends. One of our invitees bravely volunteered to host the dinner, despite what they claimed was the dismal condition of their house. We took our turkey, soup, and homemade rye bread to their house, and added it to the food contributed by our friends. We held hands for a moment of thanks, and as we savored the food, we spoke, one by one, of favorite or funny Christmases gone by.

We enjoyed the food, the ambiance, the warm conversation and camaraderie on this Christmas we’ll remember fondly despite its inauspicious start.