Celebrating Christmas In The Tropics

These days, as you know, Lief and I are dividing our time between Panama and Paris.

This year however, we’re Stateside. We’ve spent much of the holiday season in our new home here in Woodstock, Illinois. In a couple days, we’ll head to my hometown of Baltimore where we’ll meet up with the rest of the family and spend Christmas.

Meantime, back at LIOS HQ, our Panama City-based Live And Invest Overseas team is preparing to celebrate our 17th Christmas in the Hub of the Americas.

They’ve strung white lights around the trunks of the palm trees in our back garden, hung wreaths on our front gate, trimmed a fresh evergreen in our boardroom, and picked names for Secret Santa…

Our first Christmas in Panama City, 17 years ago, not knowing better, we bought our tree from the Super 99 grocery store near our apartment. We chose it from among the trees leaning against the front of the store, baking day after day in the hot sun, took it home, and then watched as our little tree lost nearly all its needles long before the 25th rolled around.

Our second Christmas in Panama City, we asked for help. Where’s the best place to buy a tree in this city, we wondered of friends. A big, fresh, live pine…

We were directed to a shop called Tzanetatos, on Vía Brazil, a warehouse with pallets of hams, wine, olives, and other holiday fixings, and, in a giant refrigerated area at the back, fresh Christmas trees, delivered direct from Canada.

Ah, this is more like it, we thought as we stood in the meat locker in our short sleeves and sandals, shivering and rubbing our hands together for warmth. We chose the tallest tree they had, took it home, and enjoyed it through the New Year.

We’ve returned to this same spot for our tree every year since, remembering to wear sweaters. Some shoppers come dressed in snow parkas.

Celebrating Christmas in the Tropics all these years, we’ve never had snow, of course, but we’ve always managed the scent of pine in the office and fresh needles underfoot.

Christmas Activities 

In our early years in Panama, we also enjoyed watching our son participate in his annual school Christmas pageant.

Jackson attended Panama City’s French school his decade growing up in Panama.

When we arrived on the scene, Paul Gauguin had a total student population, starting from pre-K, of about 75 children. When he graduated three years ago, Jackson was part of a student body that numbered more than 1,000. The school had moved a few years earlier from its original small house in a residential area of the city to a building 8 or 10 times the size in the new Panamá Pacífico city-under-construction.

I was surprised when we enrolled Jackson years ago to discover that many of the students at Panama’s French school were Panamanian. Why would a Panamanian family, living in Panama City, choose to send their children to a French-language, French-curriculum school? I still don’t know the answer to that question, but today many more Panamanian families are opting for Paul Gauguin, creating an expanding tri-lingual generation.

Of course, not all the students at Paul Gauguin are Panamanian. Jackson was one of a few Americans. His friends were kids from families that call themselves Spanish, Mexican, Colombian, Irish, English, German, Chinese, Japanese, Canadian, and, yes, French.

The parents of these wandering youngsters are in Panama as entrepreneurs, like Lief and me, or because the international companies they work for have placed them here. Some of the parents of Jackson’s school friends were in Panama working with the U.N. and other international organizations. Others were in the country for work related to various of this country’s many infrastructure projects. They and their children migrated to Panama from Mexico City or Caracas, Buenos Aires or Santiago, Paris or Madrid…

And, again, their numbers increased manyfold while we were part of the charming community they create.

Our first year in Panama, Paul Gauguin’s Christmas pageant took place in the 300-year-old Teatro Anita Villalaz in the center of Casco Viejo’s Plaza de Francia. Even back then, when the student body was much smaller than it is today, it made for as eclectic a collection of small children as you might ever find.

Some of these children, then and now, have lived in three or four other countries already, though they’ve only barely begun their little lives. Most speak Spanish and French; others also speak English, Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese…

They switch among languages effortlessly and manage to communicate among themselves cheerfully and with far less misunderstanding than you might expect.

That first year, on stage in the grand old theater on the Plaza de Francia, the young but worldly bunch from Ecole Paul Gauguin, Jackson among them, performed Christmas songs in Spanish, French, and English, including some we recognized but many we didn’t.

“Children in Palestine and children in Israel, children from the Americas and also from China, this day, let us think only of Christmas,” began one song in French.

Over the past two-and-a-half decades that Lief and I have been raising our children overseas, we have worried sometimes about the lives they’ve been living.

Jackson, for example, born in Ireland, went on to live and attend school in Paris and then Panama City. He’s an American by birth but has spent more of his life outside of the U.S. than he has in it.

If you were to ask him, Jackson would tell you that he’s Irish, with the passport to prove it. I wouldn’t call him American or Irish or French either, though the parents of his friends are shocked always to discover that Jackson’s parents are American.

“But Jackson is French, is he not?” they ask us, trying to make sense of Jackson’s Parisian French in the context of our American English.

“No, he’s American, like us,” I explain, not sure how else to describe him.

Jackson is a young guy without a country but embracing the world. Indeed, the motto for NYU Shanghai, where he’s in his final year of study, is “Make The World Your Major.”

At the French school in Panama City, Jackson connected with 1,000 other guys and girls just like him who, one evening each year, would join together to fill the tropical night with the sound of Christmas songs from around the world.

On behalf of my hardworking team down in the Hub of the Americas counting down now to the big day, Feliz Navidad.

Enjoy this special time of year, wherever in the world you find yourself celebrating.

Until next time,

Kathleen Peddicord
Founding Publisher, Overseas Opportunity Letter