Christmas and New year in Latin America

I was wondering what Christmas and New Year would be like down here in Latin America compared to Canada and Australia etc. I figured it would be quite different since the people are far more "Catholic" and I´d heard lots about the Latin religious celebrations of Easter etc.
It turns out that the Christmas celebration is a very quiet and private affair!
On the day before Christmas in Honduras, you could tell something was up, since there were huge line-ups at the banks and lots of shopping activity (sounds familiar?). On Christmas day however, it was barely possible to tell it from any other normal day. All the shops were open and running as usual (I guess a holiday is a luxury the people cant afford) and it seemed that the celebrations were held at a very private and family level. This of course on reflections seems to be exactly what you would expect and very appropriate.

New year however was quite the opposite. I had just arrived in Panama City the day before and was invited to a village party by a rider friend who had been in the city for a few days and had got us invited along with him to the hostel owners family celebrations. I don´t think it is a religious event at all, but with the local fascination for fire-works (this seems to be fairly constant in Central America although I think strongest in Guatemala) we got quite a show.
The family house was on a street in a small town about 30min from the city. All the houses on the street had banded together for decorations and there were 15-20 arches of Christmas lights over the street and all the houses were lit up. There were a couple of large rented sound systems and everyone was celebrating on their front lawns. There were occasional setting-off of fire-works through the evening and a steady consumption of beer too. This had the expected result and one erstwhile very nice young Japanese rider who was with us (Shota) went a bit too far! - (this all ends OK, so keep reading!). He held the stick for quite a large rocket in his teeth and lit the fuse. His aim was of course just to launch the rocket in a novel way. However he got more than he bargained for and failed to release the stick at the critical moment. The rocket exhaust went right into his face and then while he was still holding it in his teeth reeling in a cloud of smoke, the head end of the rocket exploded with two deafeningly loud reports!
We had all watched this swift chain of events in one of those nightmare slow-motion, unable to do anything, horror shows! When the blasts went off I was already moving toward him and I ran into the cloud of smoke expecting to find the absolute worst...

To my huge relief I found Shota staggering around with a cartoon blackened face and singed hair repeatedly saying "I'm OK, I'm OK".
I held him still and had a close look and amazingly he was in fact completely OK! I checked skin, eyes and hearing, and it all worked and continued to work the next morning as well. This was something of a minor miracle to me, but the local mothers did not view it at all well and the "stupid immature gringos" were all grouped together and given a real "telling off" about taking silly risks and setting terrible examples for the local kids etc. This was of course quite appropriate but was applied a little too broadly - But what can you do? :))
So, Shota became the pariah for the night and the party was very subdued for a while (and there were no more fire-works! ... till later)
So, after a couple more hours, midnight approached and then the large (very large) pile of confiscated fire-works were deposited in the middle of the road (This happened at every house along the street) and then the "responsible adults" (just big children in grown up bodies really) went nuts and set off the most continuous and dazzling fire-works show that I have ever seen. It was all much smaller than the professional stuff of course but it was very close and completely surrounded the street and was happening across the entirety of central America all at once. It also went on for about 20 minutes! WOW :)))
After that everybody walked around shaking hands, and then there was more drinking, and then dancing in the streets, and then people started to slow down and there were people passed out around the place, and people trying to sleep on their motorbikes. Then I found a corner of a concrete floor and curled up with my head on my day-pack.
The next morning we got up quite early (who knows how) and were greeted in the street by the neighbours who were still going, and who offered us each a nice fresh cold beer to start off the new year, and which we diplomatically declined, and then we rode back to the hostel and got some real sleep.

A good night :)