al Sur para la Navidad

My family is a bit odd in that we don’t celebrate a traditional Christmas. We agreed years ago to forgo the gifts and all spend our money on travel instead. For the past eight years, we have rented a house in the tropics for the week between Christmas and New Years. We don’t do the holiday rituals at all. Mom was a little hard to convince at first, but now we are on the same page about it.

Our familial tradition continued this year with a gringo palace in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. San Juan del Sur is a beach town that has become a stop on the tourist trail through Central America. Popular with the Euro-backpacker and surfer crowds for years, now the place is a magnet for foreign real estate developers.

In the last 10 years, the town has gone from sleepy Central American beach community to a home to hundreds of Americans and others who have built large concrete houses on the water or in the hills just outside of town. The spike in land values has probably forced more than a few families away from the bay and the ones that have stayed appear just as poor as before.

Nicaraguans are generous and gracious hosts, though. They are an outgoing people and they love to talk about politics and history. They are proud of their minor socialist feats. And they appear to not want to dwell on the darker points of their past, perhaps out of fear of embarrassing or shaming their guests. Certainly, they are not unaware of the role our government played in their prolonged civil war throughout the 80s.