First Christmas Season in Costa Rica

Unlike in the US, there are no major holidays between Costa Rica’s Independence Day (September 15) and Christmas. Stores here wasted no time in capitalizing on this timespan to promote consumer spending. You think Christmas displays go up too early in the US? Christmas displays here started going up in the stores on September 16.

The Universal store in our apartment complex completely rearranged itself in September, dedicating about a quarter of its entire first floor footprint to holiday décor, complete with multiple Christmas trees. Each aisle is color-coordinated including decorations and trees. I saw one of the completely decorated trees wrapped in plastic and hauled out to a waiting truck. Maybe they sell them decorations and all? Saves time!

Christmas decorations in the Universal department store on display in September.

They added a nearly life-size plastic Santa to welcome visitors in front of the store creating yet another photo opportunity. Their first-floor store window changes about every other week. The first week featured what we think were supposed to be elves but looked more like trolls. Since then we’ve seen nutcrackers, inflatable Disney characters, and stuffed bears in the window display with the Christmas trees.

Walmart added a whole new toy section in the hallway that runs along the outside of the store, complete with a loud broadcast of nauseatingly upbeat children’s songs in Spanish and English, that would drive a person mad if they had to spend much time there – not sure how the staff manages to make it through a ½ hour, let alone an entire shift. Inside the store, Walmart put up a holiday décor section with Christmas trees and ornaments, gift wrap, and the like. They added another section with Christmas treats – mostly chocolates and liquor. There are no Christmas cards – Costa Rica’s lack of real postal addresses probably discourages people from attempting to send holiday cheer via the country’s postal service, Correos de Costa Rica.

Costa Rica has the idea of “black Friday” but there is no Thanksgiving holiday to anchor it on. Promotions for “black weekends” started in November with advertised discounts. We made the mistake of going to pick up a few groceries in Walmart one November weekend. Apparently, everyone else in Escazú and beyond, except us, knew that Walmart was having a “black” weekend. There were yellow and orange discount signs hanging from the ceiling everywhere. Walmart is usually a pretty busy place on the weekends anyway (which is why, as a rule, we try to avoid grocery shopping in Walmart on any weekend, but sometimes you just run out of things, so there you are.) But this was on a whole other level. We’ve never seen so many large-screen TV’s precariously placed in shopping carts, almost always right next to the eggs. We were there to buy eggs, but they were almost all gone. Large-screen TV’s and eggs – who knew?

Our Escazú Village retail/apartment complex constructed a large tree out front and held a large tree-lighting event on November 10th. There was a performance with jugglers, a ballerina, a woman who performed on a ring, and a Grinch-looking character dressed in a Santa costume. A narrator that was dressed like an elf told a story that loosely combined all of these performances (it was in Spanish, so we think that was the gist of it…) and ended with the appearance of Santa Claus, the lighting of the tree, and fake snow that delighted the crowd. That was followed by fireworks and a band that sang not only Christmas songs but other songs in their repertoire, including the woman’s anthem, “I Will Survive”, for however that ties into Christmas. They brought in hundreds of seats for the general public to attend, filled by families.

They put up posters for the extravaganza in our elevator. At first they just installed plastic page holders on the elevator walls, so we knew something was coming. Then they put up the posters, but they hadn’t coordinated the size with the posters, so they didn’t fit. There are two main elevators, and in one elevator, they tried to make the poster work in the plastic page holder, and in the other, it looked like they knew it was a hopeless case, so they didn’t bother to try.

Announcements in our apartment elevators

Following the general poster, they also put up special invitation for the apartment residents to attend a party on the pool level, that overlooked the performance, where they said hot chocolate and cookies would be provided. The rainy season hadn’t yet given up on the day of the event. Whoever was in charge of setting things up near the pool hadn’t counted on rain and wasn’t looking out the window. They put up tables and set out doughnuts (yes, doughnuts, not cookies) a few hours in advance. The doughnuts weren’t covered. Then the rain started. John and I looked out our window and wondered if anyone was going to notice that the doughnuts were getting rained on. Eventually a couple of people ran to the doughnuts, with large towels over their heads, that they also used to shield the doughnuts from the rain. Another scrambled to put up a large pool umbrella on a nearby table. After the table was up, they transferred the doughnuts. We couldn’t believe they wouldn’t be soggy but were told later that they tasted fine.

The evening’s fireworks were set off from a parking lot just across the street. They were about eye level with us (4^th floor), which was really cool, but also really close. The fireworks were exploding directly over the busy road that runs between the parking lot and our Escazú Village complex. The road was not blocked off and cars just drove right under the exploding fireworks. No one seemed concerned.

Avenida Escazú, the upscale shopping area and nearby park topped their light poles with snowflake decorations. It seemed incongruous to see these large snowflakes atop poles that would never see snow adjacent to lush, green-leaved trees. I suppose people from warm-weather climates in the US like Florida or California are used to that, but being from Iowa, unless the outdoor tree is an evergreen, it’s just doesn’t seem natural. They also programmed the lighting on the walking bridge to display red and green.

We pass through the Avenida Escazú park every day, either to go to Spanish school, or on our daily walk/run. In addition to the snowflake decorations, we also saw them hanging hundreds of strands of lights from a large tree. This tree is situated in a median, of sorts, in the middle of the short road that runs through the park. It took a long time for them to put up all the strands of lights. We couldn’t wait to see it all lit up. We walked to the park a couple of times in the evening, but even though the snowflake lights were on, the tree remained dark.

The last week of November they started constructing bleachers in the park. This was a large-scale operation that took two weeks to complete. We saw a banner advertising the lighting of the tree, on December 7^th, in Avenida Escazú. The banner showed the tree with a face on it – not sure why. When we saw the banner, we didn’t completely understand it, but it seemed that it was expensive to attend this event, at least the equivalent of thirty dollars. That seemed a bit expensive to sit with strangers on open bleachers and based on the bleachers that we saw constructed, there were going to be a lot of people! (And, per usual, I was concerned about the bathroom situation. We hadn’t seen any port-a-potties along with all those bleachers.) We later found out that you didn’t exactly pay for the event, you had to make a minimum purchase of the thirty dollars at one of the stores in the Avenida Escazú shopping area. Showing the receipt gained you a ticket to the event.

The day after the event, the park was closed. However, it reopened the following day. The bleachers that took two weeks to construct were down in two days. And, the tree with the cascading lights is now on every night. It is very pretty. There is a face on the tree that defies explanation – guess you had to be at the event (and understand Spanish).

The decision not to invest our time in the tree lighting event was made easier when our Spanish teacher decided to hold his annual Christmas party on the same day. Every year he invites all his student and their families/guests to this party. He also told us he is smart enough to invite his neighbors so that they don’t complain about the noise. He has students from different places in the world, and he asked that we each bring food reflecting our own country.

Our teacher told us that parties in Costa Rica start at noon and last until whenever, which may be midnight. People can come and go as they please. A fellow classmate, who is married to a Costa Rican woman, told us that probably no one would show up at noon, that just wasn’t done in Costa Rica. He said his family weren’t going to bother to show up until two p.m. John, from our apartment complex (from the Witch House hunt), who had been in our class and was going to restart after the first of the year, asked if we wanted to share an Uber with he and his wife who was visiting for a few weeks. However, she wanted to see a football game that started at 3:00, so they were going to go at 1:00 p.m.

We were a bit concerned about arriving too early. However, we agreed, and when we showed up, there were already a lot of people there, so that worked out fine. Probably the reason why there were so many people that had arrived sooner than Costa Rica “on time” was that our teacher has a lot of Germans in his classes. (Don’t ask me why, there just are.) As one German guest explained to me, if Germans hold a party, the German guests show up to the minute and are waiting outside the door for the clock to strike that time. Although most of the time everyone spoke the common language of English, the German clique moved off to their own area and enjoyed speaking their own language to each other.

Of course, there was a lot of great food. John and I wanted to not only go “US”, but full “Iowa/Midwest” with our food items. We decided on two things to bring. The first, baked beans, is a dish that we had prepared for our yearly Pestotnik family reunion, and one that I have brought to many potlucks. The recipe is straight out of a 1983 Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. (No just dumping beans from a can for us!) We also decided to bring “scotch-a-roos.” If you’re from the Midwest, you know exactly what those are.

Searching for ingredients is always a thing here for us. The baked beans required items that were easily found in our Walmart – onion, bacon, Worcestershire sauce (even the brand Lea & Perrins, the original company formed by the chemists who invented the sauce in the first half of the 19^th century!), etc. And what about the beans? Walmart even had Campbells Pork & Beans, albeit the smallest cans Campbell’s sells. We bought 12 cans to ensure we had enough. We don’t have a slow cooker but decided that we would just make it up in a disposable aluminum pan (also from Walmart). After all, baked beans taste good hot or cold so they would be fine. As it turns out, the beans (or frijoles) were a surprisingly big hit that a lot of people hadn’t had before.

The bean preparation went smoothly until John took them out of the oven. The beans were fine, but when John tried to turn off the oven, things went south. You may remember our Cato oven, the one with no instructions, that isn’t installed properly (at all) so that it pulls out from the counter when you open the door? Since I last wrote about it, the inside light had gone out, and when John had tried to unscrew it to see if we could replace it, it broke. Also, the stripping around the door was coming off. Still it had been serviceable enough, as long as we continued to push it back in place when we the opened the door and used a flashlight to peer into the door window if we wanted to see how things were coming along.

But as we were scrambling to get things ready for the party, John pulled the large baked bean pan out of the oven and tried to turn it off. You turn off the oven by pushing in the two knobs with mysterious symbols. The knobs get very hot when the oven is used (that just doesn’t seem like it should be right) so John had to use hot pads when he pushed in the oven knobs. One of the knobs decided to lodge itself entirely within the panel with no possible way of getting it out, especially when it was hot.

We hoped that the oven was actually turned off before we left for the party – it was. The oven was finally totally useless now so later that night we informed our landlord that she needed to get a repairman. The repairman came on the following Tuesday and although it took him over an hour and a trip to get a light, he managed to repair all four of the major issues – (lack of) installation, stripping, light and recessed knob. Note that we still don’t have proper instructions for the oven and continue to wing it. We can’t figure out how to set the clock and have to press the function keys in random order to get it to operate again after any small electrical outage.

Cato oven strikes again, but the repairman strikes back!

The scotch-a-roos turned into a multi-week project. Scotch-a-roos are made with Rice Krispie cereal, sugar, peanut butter, Karo syrup, and topped with melted semi-sweet chocolate morsels and butterscotch chips. (Why is it that the chocolate chips are referred to as “morsels” and the butterscotch morsels are referred to as “chips”?) It’s a pretty simple recipe and people in the Midwest love their scotch-a-roos! When we told other non-Midwest Americans we were bringing them, they gave us a deer-in-the-headlights look. From that we were assured no one else would be bringing them. We also wanted to decorate them for the holidays like we usually do, with some green icing and redhots (aka cinnamon imperials) to look like holly.

We could find sugar and peanut butter at Walmart (already had them in our apartment). But everything else? None of it was in Walmart, so we had to start our search. Our first find was Rice Krispie cereal when we stopped in the AutoMercado supermarket in the large Multi-Plaza mall on the way home from class one day. AutoMercado is the place to go to when you want to find US items. But, you have to be prepared to pay for them. We found Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup for about $4 a can there. I can’t even tell you how much the Rice Krispie cereal was, but we were so happy to find it, we paid the price. Since we hadn’t planned on doing grocery shopping that day, we carried the cereal out of the store and into the mall to put it into our backpacks. Another American couple noticed that we had Rice Krispies and stopped to ask us if we had found it in the AutoMercado. They seemed very happy to know it was there.

We gave up on Karo syrup and looked up substitutes using the Internet. We decided that cane syrup should work just fine and was very cheap. They make it here in Costa Rica. We bought it, it tasted OK, so we were set. Before we made the scotch-a-roos, we visited another AutoMercado store and found one lone bottle of Karo Syrup. The price worked out to be about $14. We just didn’t think we could justify it so proceeded with the cane syrup. We did, however, find Crown Royal, a liquor that John used to occasionally enjoy in the US, and had not been able to find anywhere here. We weren’t prepared to pay $14 for Karo syrup, but whatever the cost of the Crown Royal worked out to be, it seemed to be OK for John, so we bought it.

And the decorations for the scotch-a-roos? We hunted all over for redhots, to no avail. We even trekked the 45 minutes over to El Rey that has multiple rows of candy, floor to ceiling. No redhots or anything similar. Back to frosting only, so we bought an inexpensive icing decorating bag with a few tips at El Rey. Fortunately, in the trip to AutoMercado when we snagged the Crown Royal, we also found one lone can of Betty Crocker cupcake icing, that was the color green. We snagged it too.

Butterscotch chips are nowhere to be found, not even for an exorbitant price at AutoMercado. Again, we consulted the Internet to find that it was possible to make your own butterscotch chips using brown sugar, butter and coconut oil. The brown sugar from Walmart is not like what we find in the US. It doesn’t have any moisture and is just like brown sand. We didn’t think it would make a difference, so continued on. We made up the butterscotch and used it in its liquid state with the melted chocolate morsels for the scotch-a-roo topping. It was a bit “grainy” from the sand-like brown sugar, but it tasted fine, although admittedly not exactly like a pre-made butterscotch chip. I had butterscotch left over and poured it onto a pan to let it set up. The result looked more like beef jerky. It tasted OK, but wasn’t the most appetizing to look at.

As a finished product, the resulting scotch-a-roos looked like they should. I made up simple powdered sugar icing and colored it red for holly berries and used the green icing for holly leaves. I tried to make a few Christmas trees, but they didn’t turn out as well, so went back to the holly.

Amassing supplies as we were able to gather them

We had planned on transferring the decorated scotch-a-roos into a disposable pan that we could leave at the party, since we didn’t plan on staying there until “whenever.” However, when we took out the first bar, we found the Rice Krispie layer was somewhat crumbly. Guess cane syrup isn’t an exact substitute for corn syrup. We decided to take them in the pans we’d made them in and hope for the best.

As it turns out, people ate most of one pan, so we transferred the few remaining bars from that pan onto a plate before we left.

We bought a few wrapped chocolates and candies from Walmart, and with the other pan of scotch-a-roos made up two large goodie plates as a “thank you” for the staff at our apartment complex. We delivered it in the afternoon and when we stopped by later that day, two empty plates were returned to us.

We also wanted to make up some goodie boxes for our neighbors and also for a few of the security guards that greet us every day when we walk by them in our neighborhood. We bought some boxes and small gift tags when we went to El Rey. We wanted to top them with a small giftwrapping bow. You know, the kind you buy in a clear plastic bag anywhere they sell gift wrap in the US. Well, we found out that’s another item you can’t find here. Neither El Rey nor Walmart’s holiday section had them, although there was plenty of gift wrap to be found. (How do you not have bows for the gift wrap?) We settled on some small decorations to adorn our boxes in lieu of the bows.

We also decided to try our hand at the scotch-a-roos again for these goodie boxes. This time when we went back to AutoMercado, they had replenished the Karo Syrup, so we forked over $14 for it and bought a US brand of brown sugar. They also had “replenished” the canned Betty Crocker icing, so now there were two cans, one white and one pink, but no red. We passed. But, what a difference in the scotch-a-roos! The homemade butterscotch turned out much more natural looking, due to the brown sugar, and the Rice Krispie layer stuck together, because of the Karo syrup.

We did spend one class discussing Costa Rica Christmas traditions. There are several parades in downtown San Jose that attract up to one million people. Because we don’t have a good way to get there and back, we decided to forgo watching them. The biggest one is the parade of lights with bands and floats. It sounds like it would be spectacular. There is also a horse parade and a parade where people make big head costumes and dance around in them. There’s also a tradition in most towns where people get in a ring with an angry bull. It’s not like the running of the bulls, because these people are in the ring with the bull. It’s not like bull fighting, because these people are not professionals. Supposedly there are prizes, but even after the explanation, I don’t understand how you win them. Maybe by just surviving?

The traditional Costa Rican food is tamales wrapped in banana leaves. From what we’re told, every family’s tamale recipe is a source of pride. Kind of like our baked beans and scotch-a-roos!