Well, long ago I thought it was disconcerting and not really in the spirit of things to spend Christmas in Chile, where it was summer and the guy in the fur suit looked a bit out of place. And Venezuela was tropical year round, though to give them credit the Venezuelans tend to put up extraordinary amounts of Christmas decorations and shoot off fireworks all night long. But I think Kabul may top them in terms of not being your prototypical Christmas-y place. For starters, there aren't really any days off, so what on paper seems to be a two and a half day weekend for us isn't. Secondly, there just isn't much to do here that fits within the Christmas spirit, though the mosque prayer call yesterday at sundown was much more audible than usual. Oh yeah, and it's a Muslim country, and that might have something to do with it.
We walked over to ISAF headquarters to get a cafe au lait at a coffee shop we call French, though it's actually run by Nepalese, but does tend to have French soldiers there. That was pretty much the highlight of Christmas Eve for us. We didn't bring any Christmas movies to watch, but even if we wanted to watch them on TV, unfortunately the AFN TV schedule is geared to European time zones, so everything starts too late for us to bother watching. The compound is pretty deserted except for when the security forces are carrying out a shift change and you see a half-dozen guys with automatic rifles scurrying around. But we did hang up our Christmas lights (one string of blue flower-shaped lights was all we had) in our apartment, and we put on Handel's Messiah in the background. And that's that for Christmas for us. Maybe next year.
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