3:00 snapshot #1487: Fort Myers Beach, Florida

[urbpan]

Here's my dad at Pete's Time Out, with an alert boat-tailed grackle over his shoulder.



The female grackles are a little smaller and brown. This one watches from the threshold of another restaurant.


Across the way a male has found a pay phone is a suitable lookout.


A short walk away is the nearby beach.


All the birds seem bolder here. This little sandpipers ran right among some swimmers to feed in the surf. In New England you wouldn't be able to get within 50 feet of them. I think these are western sandpipers Calidris mauri.


But this is rather too bold. This double-crested cormorant has an injured foot, and is perhaps too hurt or tired to fly away from these very very close human observers.


Enter Snowman. I am constantly amazed that tropical people bother to pretend about the winter holiday season. The country xmas music and the string lights wrapped around palm trees are everywhere, but I thought this was actually pretty cute. Those are palm frond arms.


"Hello kids! My face is made of the skeletons of marine animals!"

Comments

[lisianthia.livejournal.com]

I LOLed on the caption of that last photo.

[uneko.livejournal.com]

" I am constantly amazed that tropical people bother to pretend about the winter holiday season. The country xmas music and the string lights wrapped around palm trees are everywhere"

Hi. I grew up in Hawaii.
It was always very sad to me, to watch all of the "holiday" specials on TV. Every halloween show had autumn leaves of colors I'd never seen on a real tree before. I remember picking up the dead leaves of my mango tree in shadows of yellow and brown and try to imagine not only the whole tree covered in them, but evey other tree in my yard turning shades of yellow, brown, rust... ... it never happened. Just a dream. Every Christmas special, almost entirely without fail, took place somewhere COLD and there was always snow on Christmas, and winter break was ALL ABOUT the going outside and making snow men, and snow angels and snow ball fights and... and... in hawaii it drizzled a little. I started a sandball fight with my brother, but we discovered really quickly that sand in the eye doesn't melt, and hurts instead.

But that didn't stop us from making snow men -- out of wet sand, of course, because dry sand won't hold together, then trying to carefully coat the outside with the white, dry fine powder sand that exists further up the beach. We got more sand in our eyes there.... Our Sand men were decorated with the skeletons of marine animals and things like sticks that had washed up, kukui nuts (they looked kind of like lumps of coal), and the washed up corpses of seaweed.

Why? Because we didn't have anything else to do. TV and movies showed us that snow men was what you did in winter and we didn't HAVE snow so we made do.

Just like we had string lights wrapped up around our mango tree.

We had a fir tree inside, of course, for presents. but we still had white batting and tinsel tryign to pretend to be snow and icicles.

"Lucky we live Hawaii" I remember thinking one day, as I took my brand new bike outside to the road to ride around, looking up at the temperate, but overcast sky. ... but it always felt like something was missing.

and of course it did. TV and movies didn't exist for "Hawaiian Christmases"... All we saw was the outside example that what we had and did wasn't right. Even the traditional american image of santa is horribly wrong for the tropics. Long sleeved fur lined coat and pants? boots and a hat and a heavy beard in 80 degree weather? that's crazy, man.

... you express amazement that we "bother to pretend about the winter holiday season".... I ask you... what should we be doing instead..? We LIVE here, we grow up here, we raise families here. Not everyone is vacationing or passing through to lands colder and more Christmasy....

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

I did not know that the black grackles are all male.

And I *love* the sandy "snowman" -- who woulda thunk such a thing is a thing?

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I ask you... what should we be doing instead..?

Celebrating a native holiday in a native way. In my fantasies people in tropical places would take one look at the xmas trappings and say "yeah right, no thanks" and get on with celebrating something else, something that makes sense.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

See uneko's comment above for the answer to that one.

[uneko.livejournal.com]

(I find it important to note that I'm not angry or upset or anything, just chatting and debating, and conversing and such :) )

But... I'm American. I was born and raised in America. Hawaii is part of America and has been since 1959. Most of the kids I went to school with were American too. about a quarter of them were military. American Military.

While I'm not in favor of the idea that Christianity is America's unofficial official religion, it doesn't change the fact that it is. some ... 70? percent of Americans are Christian.... and the vast majority of Americans celebrate Christmas. Speaking of Americans--which we Hawaiians are--according to this other website over here, the national average for the US is 48% religious--not that you need to be religious to celebrate Christmas-- and Hawaii's average is 41%. Mostly christian, of course. We have more LDS then Baptists, more Pentecostals then Lutheran or Methodists.. but generally pretty average.. Our biggest deviation from average is that don't have near as many Baptists, but past that, we have 5% of people who follow an eastern religion.. compared to .5%. "Native Hawaiian" religion isn't really a thing, though.

We had that beaten out of us in the early 1800's.

People wouldn't like native Hawaiian religion, anyway. We don't have a nice "The spirits" so much as we have a pantheon of hundreds, ranging from gods to family guardians.

So yeah. We're a western culture. Not unlike the american indians that also had religion beaten out of them. And as many primarily oral traditions, we don't know much about what the ancients really celebrated.

We have the Makahiki, with was a 4 month long celebration in winter. There was a lot of celebration, cleansing, sports and feasting. Unfortunatly, we're american, so we can't really take 4 months off. but it does coincidentally fall in november and december.

In the islands, we have our own 'may day' festivities. WE have several 'cultural celebrations'.. we have several days celebrating old monarchs.

We also make a big deal about the Chinese new year, because about halfish of the population is Asian... then White, then Pacific Islander... though Pacific Islander means a lot more than just native Hawaiian.

Basically what I'm trying to say is.. Hawaii is a mismash of cultures, melted together, mixed together. We celebrate Christmas because we're largely christian, like the rest of the US. More, it's the american thing to do. Even nonChristians celebrate Christmas.

It's kind of important to note that we're not purely american with how we do things. On the island, we do it island style. We're hardly sitting there going "oh, how I wish we had snow... we fail at holidays...." we do things our own way. our santa-in-board shorts, our colorful christmas lights on our palm trees, our christmas ukelele... our potlucks will all of our family, with a imu roasted kalua pig and opihi and haupia and lomilomi samon and so forth... that's what we do. The snow man made out of snow might seem like us desperatly tying to emulate another "culture"... but this is our culture. it's what we've made it.

It's not like Christmas is a uniquely christian/american idea anyway, being based on and around as many ancient pagan ideas as it is... not like Christmas today is what it was 50 years ago, or 100 years ago.. things are always changing and moving.

While I think it'd be great if more ancient cultures were still around and kicking... we're American, down here, y'know? (and, for that matter, so's florida)

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

And by "native" I didn't necessarily mean "the culture of the indigenous people" I meant something relating to the sense of place of the people who live there. What's happening where you live in December that deserves recognition and celebration?

Christianity is already hopelessly weird and out of place, being the religion of desert nomads in one tiny corner of the world, but then to transpose it through various kinds of imperialism to everywhere else is so bizarre.

It's fine that xmas has changed and adapted to absorb the traditions in places where it spreads (Being in December from Roman Saturnalia, yule tree from northern europe, saint nickolas from??Turkey??) but then it seems to have calcified with Victorian era United States. I don't think Christmas has changed very much in the past 100 years except that it's become a fully secular holiday that's more about retailers balancing their books than anything ele. It's a shame it doesn't shift to make sense to people celebrating it in places that don't look like New England or Finland. Poor santas wearing fur suits in Australia in the middle of summer.

Anyway, it's inescapable, but it's still optional.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

And to add: I am sorry that you felt compelled to make sand snowmen in order for it to feel right at xmastime. One of the things I hate most about the holiday is how you are made to feel terrible if you aren't participating in it.

But it is still optional.