Children's Day

25 July 2015

Awoooo Children’s Day.  Definitely one of the best days of the year and one of my favorite public holidays.  In the U.S. we have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and a whole collection of ridiculous ________’s Days, but how do we not have Children’s Day?? In Vanuatu the day is spent cooking and eating and playing and, at least in my village, every family of kids, and sometimes every individual kid, gets their own cake! My nephew Ensly was born two years ago on Children’s Day so Children’s Day in our family is a super-sugar charged day of celebration. His sister Elsa’s birthday was at the beginning of the month too so Children’s Day is also double birthday party!

Yesterday, the kids all had the day off of school and spent the morning running around and playing. We kicked off Children’s Day celebrations at lunch with sweet bread covered in thick coconut cream and local chicken soup with lots of vegetables, over rice of course. I made sure my speaker was fully charged so that we could listen to their favorite Vanuatu bands all day, shout out to Smol Vilej and Stan & The Earth Force (check out these links below and then go to Itunes and support the Vanuatu music scene!)

At lunch we called all of our family outside the village to wish them a happy Children’s Day and ask them about their celebration program. After some good storian and of course lots of jokes and laughs (half of which I think I understood fully, if not I just laughed anyway of course), we prepared laplap for Sabbath to get that out of the way before it got too late. We had all baked our cakes the night before but now had to decorate them. I tried my best to make a cake with the Vanuatu colors and, although the colors weren’t very strong, it came out alright. The bottom layer was chocolate (black) and then the top layer was a tie dye mix of red, yellow and green (color provided by m&ms sent by Laura Klatka aka “first Laura”). This cake was for my brother Niki whose mama lives in another village so wasn’t here to make him a cake, Yano,  tawi Taini and me because we decided that, since we were the only ones who didn’t have kids, we were allowed to celebrate as children.

We butter creamed the cakes with green frosting (margarine mixed with simple syrup and green food coloring) and then wrote “Happy Birthday” or “Happy Children’s Day” on all of them. Once the decorating was done we went back to our houses to prepare our soups and other food for the evening and then swam and got ready for the festivities. As the sun was getting ready to set we all gathered outside my sister Lisa’s house (mami blo Ensly and Elsa) for opening Sabbath worship and countdown to cake time. After worship, once everyone in family Jovi had gathered, Ensly and Elsa cut their cakes fist and then the rest of the kids followed, each cutting their individual cakes.

In Vanuatu, we don’t waste time filling up on food before cake time—we go right for the cake. There were seven cakes in total, a huge bowl of popcorn, a bowl of Skittles (also provided by first Laura) and a big container filled with juice. Everyone got their own plate with a slice of each cake and additional treats on it, meaning that most of the kids really only had sugar for dinner and had no room for rice and soup or the delicious laplap sosor, which is fine, because it just meant the adults could eat all the sosor we wanted. Of course, it was impossible not to eat any of the cake first so, while I generally go back two times for laplap, I was limited to one by the slowly increasing pain in my stomach.

After everyone was full of sugar and yam, we sat around storing for awhile. I laid down on tawi Taini’s lap and she braided my hair while I drifted into a food coma induced smol sleep. Everyone storied for awhile but eventually we all got up and gave into our sugar high crash and went home. I got back to my house, brushed my teeth, changed quickly and basically fell right asleep. It’s sad to think that I may not be in the village for Children’s Day next year but I did plant a yam earlier this week and will need to dig it up in about a year so who knows, maybe it will fall on or around the 24^th of July.

I woke up this morning with a slightly sore stomach and a headache but it’s alright because, Sabbath. Time to spel.