Our Chilean Christmas

Here's a quick post to tell you about our Christmas here in Chile. Like much of Europe, Chileans tend to have their main celebration on Christmas Eve, getting together with family for a big meal and then presents are opened around midnight. As far as we know, the main meal is fairly similar to what we have in the UK, or what they have in the US - turkey and trimmings. There are a few differences with some of the traditional foods though. 

The big fake Christmas tree in the main plaza in Santiago

the half-built fake Christmas tree

If you enlarge the photo above you should be able to see that the "baubles" have "Coca-Cola" on them. Many things in Chile seem to be sponsored by Coca-Cola (though Pepsi gets music festivals it seems). We guess sponsoring Christmas makes some sense, given that Coca-Cola essentially created our image of Santa Claus, Father Christmas, or Viejito Pascuero as he's known here.  

So, this being southern hemisphere Christmas, we spent Christmas Eve (day) in the pool on our roof terrace...

Yay! Some views from the rooftop:

As many things were very different about Christmas here, and some the same, we decided just to largely make it up. In our little kitchen we made a lovely fig breakfast:

big baked figs, honey, yoghurt and toasted walnuts

We spent much of Christmas Day on skype to family, and these kept us going:

Spinach and cheese empanaditas

Happy Christmas!

 Then, as we're in South America, we got a couple of big steaks in and had them with papas mayonesa (potato mayonnaise) and a tomato based sauce that we made using the same ingredients as the spicy chilean sauce chancho en piedra, washed down with a bottle of carmenere we had been saving.

Yum!

As most Chileans had done their main celebrating the night before, Christmas Day itself felt much like one of the many Chilean bank/ public holidays. We had a walk through the park, which was what everyone else was doing:

sleeping it off

Struan with Christmas Day lucuma ice-cream!

xmas day volleyball in the park

Parque Forestal

Later on we had a couple of Chilean Christmas classics, Cola de Mono (Monkey's Tail), and Pan de Pascua (Christmas Cake).

Anna made the Cola de Mono herself, it's a milky but alcoholic drink, served cold, made with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, coffee, milk and aguardiente (a grape brandy). Very tasty and dangerously more-ish!

We bought the Pan de Pascua, which was lovely (and still going). The best way to describe it is a cross between regular Christmas cake and Pannetone- it's a mixture of fruit soaked in booze and whole nuts and spices. 

our sad little cards!

So we made the best of our Christmas away from our families, southern hemisphere Christmas is very strange, but at least it was so different that we didn't feel too sad to be away from home. Though we did have to turn the Christmas music off.

Merry Christmas from us, we're off to party in Valparaiso for new year's eve!

chao!