White (Hot) Christmas
[From December Mosaic]
Carla Wanty, a native of Ecuador and RMM staff member, writes in the December issue of The Brotherhood Beacon about the experience of an Ecuadorian Christmas.
[In Ecuador] we are closer to the sun, so instead of having the typical four seasons we have only two: winter (rainy season) and summer (dry season). There are small climate variations, but most people from the [U.S.] would consider it to be hot during most of the year. It’s common for us to say, “Wow, winter is here, and it’s so hot.”
As night falls on Guayaquil my family loads all fifteen of us in our little van and we head for downtown. On the way to downtown we pass by the “barrios,” (neighborhoods) to look at their nativity scenes… As we start to enter downtown Guayaquil images fill our eyes of large buildings with perfectly placed lights, nativity scenes filling store front windows, and of course the many different Santa Clauses with their red warm costume in the middle of our hot humid winter.
Read the rest of this article to learn more about Christmas through the lens of a culture closer to the equator in the December issue of The Brotherhood Beacon.