Christmas in 30 degrees

This year I celebrated Christmas in Sao Paulo. It was very different from a normal Xmas for me, mainly due to the temperature. For me it should be a few degrees below zero and snow during this time of year. OK, that doesn't always happen, but it's still the norm. However, this year we had about 30 degrees. I will post some pictures from Sao Paulo in another post.

Here they basically celebrate both on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day. It basically starts with that everyone goes to church on the evening of the 24th. So I spent Christmas Eve in a catholic church together with almost 1 000 Brazilians, listening to a ceremony which was held in Portuguese. I didn't understand too much of what was said, but it was a big spectacle. The best part was close to the end when they dimmed the lights and everyone lit a candle while singing Christmas carols.

After the ceremony we went home to some people we know and ate a lot of traditional Brazilian Christmas food. Even though it was traditional for them, the only dish I had tried before was the rice. We ate outside underneath a tree, which was full of grapes. So quite far away from my typical Christmas with snow.

Of course there was also dessert, with a lot of cakes and fruits.

Just after midnight Santa Claus came to drop off Christmas gifts. He rang the door bell, opened the door and dropped off a bag full with gifts before he disappeared to the next house. Even though the kids were running like crazy to the door they didn't manage to see more than Santa's arm before he was gone.
Then we had secret Santa, or secret friend as they call it here. Everyone is randomly assigned one person to whom they buy a gift.

Christmas Day is basically one long barbecue. The barbecue was started in the early afternoon and was kept on until late in the evening. Christmas might be celebrated in different ways in different places, but it seems like obsessive amounts of food is something that is common everywhere.

This day we had secret enemy, which is basically the same as secret friend but you don't have anyone assigned to give a gift to. Instead everyone puts one gift in a pile, from which everyone picks a gift in a random order. The enemy part comes from that instead of choosing a gift from the pile, you can steal a gift from someone who already picked. 

At some point during the day we ran out of beer. Therefore me and one of the other guys went to the closest shop that was open, a gas station. We ended up buying all the beer they had, which wasn't all that much, but the cashier still thought it was a bit much for only two guys...