Yuletidin'

Spending Christmas in Burkina Faso, amongst the bottom 5 countries on earth by almost any measure of human welfare, just begs for a cliche-laden blog post about the obscenity of our Christmas materialism. I thought about writing that. I certainly often find Christmas obscene. The funny thing is, though, that now is not the time at which I find the contrast most jarring.

It's actually really easy to explain Christmas's excesses to Burkinabes, most of whom can sympathize with blowing an unsustainable amount of money on a holiday or festival or marriage or whatnot. It's common enough in West Africa, as I think it probably is all over the world. Indeed, the significance of these big fetes is probably quite a bit bigger, even in material terms. I wouldn't be surprised if what a Burkinabe family spends putting on a feast for their friends isn't a bigger fraction of their income than even the most rapacious Christmas shopping. Big events certainly are "bigger" in lives that are otherwise so harshly delimited by the shit end of the climactic stick that keeps life in the Sahel so marginal.

To me, the real shock is not the burst of christmas consumption, but rather the continual outflow of money that characterizes our life at home. Here I live, and live rather well, on around 30 bucks a day. That's more than most Burkinabe earn in a month. Splashing out on a bottle of wine at Christmastime is nothing special - but I can buy a bottle of wine every day. Festivals for me aren't tinged by the barely-suppressed desparation of living on the edge of family catastrophe. Unless you're indigenous, not even the poorest Canadians have a lived experience anywhere near as tenuous. Without that sense of risk, perhaps, it's a little bit harder to really pour your emotions into a moment like Christmas.

Indeed, I got just that arguement last night from the neighbourhood salad lady in the back suburb of Bobo-Dioulasso where I was staying. Her sons, like many other young Burkinabe, had left to work in Cote D'Ivoire and come back changed, with money but also with a sudden attachment to having stuff that she was finding rather difficult to integrate. I still think it's a little trite to complain about the erosion of community by prosperity, when "prosperity" means a little cushion that staves off desparation, but clearly it is a real process.

Still, most families have a long way to go before they risk the soulessness that can happen at Christmas time in the West. Even amongst Christians here, present-giving isn't such a big thing. When people splash out on Christmas, they splash out on food for their friends and family, on music, on beer. I can sympathize with that.

Although Christmas' core as a Christian festival is well enough known - most Muslims are pretty down with Jesus, and have some awareness that the day marks his birth - it doesn't really seem to matter much. Everything will be closed, but just as with the ghost-towns that West African cities become on a Sunday, it's mostly a hangover from many years of colonial rule.

That's not to say that Christmas itself is viewed purely as some foreign imposition. There simply aren't enough foreigners here to account for the mass of Christmas decorations and bric-a-brac being hawked on street corners (though, really only in the bigger cities). As with much of the rest of the world, Christmas seems to have become something of a catch-all holiday for those who have the resources to observe it.

So here I am in Burkina Faso, a foreigner with not a hint of Christianity in him who nevertheless has always enjoyed the season. I think I take as much pleasure in ritual, sometimes, as a religious person does, and Christmas is nothing if not ritualistic. My family also spends a remarkably small amount of time together, especially considering how close many of us (at least on my father's side) live to one another, so Christmas is perhaps a little bit more special for it. In any case, I like Christmas. I like the smell of a live tree, decorated as tackily as possible. I like the piles of food that lurk around every corner. I like curling up on a Christmas morning, well-slept and as far as I possibly can get from needing to do anything. I like the snow, when it's there. I like the feeling of connection to a string of recognizably similar days stretching back as far as I can remember.

With all this memory, Christmas abroad can be a bit dislocating. I've done it once before, in India. There, oddly, I was staying in an old Portuguese church on the coast, probably the closest thing to a religious christmas I'll ever have. I even ate fish! This time, Christmas eve will pass with a big dinner out in the garden of my little inn, with music and wine and wine-augmented French chatter. Tomorrow, Christmas day will find me curled up under a mango tree with a book, a pile of chocolates and treats, and not a care in the world. As far as this finds me from a white Christmas with the people I love, I still think it'll be pleasant.

I unashamedly sought the company of other foreigners for the holiday, but I'm happy how I found it - at a place run by a Canadian-Burkinabe couple, deeply integrated into the local community, with their kids and the neighbourhood ones running about, climbing on me and making mischief with the musical instruments. It should be a Christmas dinner with allusions enough to set me to being pleasantly maudlin about home - and I do miss home at this time of year - without being just a table full of homesick white people. This, I think, is good.

And so we will sit, and eat, and drink, and in a couple days return to life as rich travellers in a poor place, travellers who have to go through all this fuss for a couple days of the same communal life that people here enjoy simply for lack of any other option. We can afford to go it alone, to travel alone, to live alone, to only see our family on holidays. However most Burkinabe might like to have that sort of freedom, most never will. Those who earn 30 bucks a month will often give 25 to support their extended families, and in turn depend on those families for everything.

So many of our own Christmas pleasures in the West come from tapping briefly into that communal joy with the safety net of our own potential independance right below us. We give because we can. Others give because they must.

Merry Christmas
Josh