By Renee Lajcak

Renee writes both for the page and for performance, adjusting her style for each. “For spoken word, I use shorter sentences, more repetition. On the page, you can be more abstract. For listeners, I keep it visual, ‘in your face’,” she says. Performing lets her shape how her audience experiences her stories through her stress and intonation; reading aloud is how she prefers to publish on this blog.

Christmas on Java

I spent one Christmas on Java, in Indonesia, where familiar traditions were balanced by strange ones and new ones to create a Christmas that I will never forget.

Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population and 87% of Indonesians identify as Muslim, but there is no state religion. However, Indonesia recognizes several major religions, so there are national holidays for nearly all: Hindu Nyepi, Muslim Eid, etc. Thus Christmas is a national holiday and a day oﬀ of work.

I was looking forward to Christmas Eve in Indonesia. I was invited to a party thrown by the very international, foreign missionaries in town. They were a rather right clique with their shared religious purpose, but invited me to events now and then. Christmas Eve would begin with an international potluck, so I decided to bake something familiar, an American apple pie. This was a challenge in a country with few apples and fewer ovens, but luckily, up in the hills outside my tropical city was a cooler region, famous for this “exotic” fruit. And my homestay family had recently bought an oven, perhaps as a status symbol. No one had ever used it, and it sat like a throne in its shiny white, virginal state. Then I needed fat for the crust. Lard would be nearly impossible to ﬁnd in Muslim Java, and I didn’t want to use the common palm oil, but I knew I could buy Dutch butter in a can. The pie turned out well and oﬀ I went into the evening, darkness falling quickly near the equator. The Christmas Eve potluck with the missionaries was like a quick visit home, with familiar foods and a few Midwesterners. A short skit by the children and some carol singing created a comforting and familiar Hallmark Christmas.

I jumped from familiarity into the exotic and fantastic. The next thing on my Christmas Eve schedule was a wedding! I worked at a university, and our chancellor’s daughter was getting married. The entire staﬀ was invited (and expected to attend) the Javanese wedding reception at the university.

The hall was set up with a large platform at one end, which was covered with ﬂowers and backed by a wooden carved backdrop in gold. A full gamelan orchestra played their xylophones and gongs in the background. On the platform sat the bride and groom, adorned in traditional Central Javanese royalty style, golden sarongs and leis of jasmine. Two young girls with huge fans made of peacock feathers slowly fanned the couple. The guests made a long line to greet and give best wishes to the couple.

After that, we each received a waxed cardboard box of fried chicken and rice to eat. There was no alcohol, of course. It was the most un-Christmassy of Christmas events I had ever been to.

I soon left and hired a “becak”, a bicycle rickshaw or pedicab, to take me home now that it was dark. A couple of blocks from my homestay, I noticed that the big white cement church on the corner had streams of people going in. I had heard that the congregation was made up of people from the Indonesian island of Ambon, and that the Ambonese are famous for their singing. I impulsively told the becak driver to drop me oﬀ there. I entered the church and was handed a program. Inside the folded sheet, I found all familiar carols, the lyrics printed in Indonesian, which I could easily read. The familiarity was soothing and the service was nearly all a capella singing. The main section of the church below and the balcony above were packed with Ambonese singing in full, rich voices and harmonies. I felt surrounded by and immersed in reverberating, undulating voices, soothing my brain into total comfort even though I was the only non-Indonesian out of the hundreds there. To me, this captured the familiar essence of Christmas – singing in joy and welcoming a stranger on a peaceful night.

After the service, I walked the remaining two blocks home. It was very dark by then; street lights were few and far between in our city. I could see that my homestay family had gone to bed, so I quietly went to my small house in the backyard and lit my little Christmas tree. I took out my tiny, immoral bottle of rum (hidden from my Muslim homestay family) and poured myself a cup of hot spiced tea spiked with rum. Then I turned on my shortwave radio to ﬁnd Christmas carols somewhere out there in the world. A drink, a song, a tree – it felt a little like Christmas back home. There weren’t any Christmas bells on Java that night, but every night, each neighborhood watchman hit something every hour on the hour – a hollow log, a bar of metal – as a kind of clock. From where I lived, I could hear at least three of these, ringing and clunking out the deep night hours. Other than those soothing pseudo-bells and a soft carol on the shortwave, there was no sound, no phone to call my family, no one around at all. The quiet of Christmas Eve was with me, both familiar and strange, ordinary and extraordinary.

Renee is a newly retired English language teacher who has taught in several Asian countries but now enjoys her woodsy backyard the best. She loves the connections made through storytelling and teaching conversational English, but writing about memories allows her to go inward to contemplate the good, the bad and the ugly. But mostly the good.