Hello and happy holidays! Wishing you all the best and maybe some snow!

The holiday season is fascinating here in Yerevan. Armenia is very proudly the oldest Christian nation on earth, and thus, as one can imagine, it is a spectacle to see the Christmas exhilaration in the air here. The capital city is bustling with festive energy.

The streets are busy with holiday shopping and festive music, all beneath canopies of Christmas lights. The trees and buildings are decked in wreaths, lights, and ornaments, and the little grocery stores are filled with all the holiday treats, from Christmas Cookies to Sujukh, an Armenian candy made of walnuts coated in different flavors of molasses.

Amidst the holiday excitement, I find myself caught in the whirlwind of exhaustion and delight. In only a few days, my dad will come out to visit me, meeting a whole section of his own family that he has never met. It feels profound in a way the holidays have never felt to me before.

The holidays are always a time of family, love, and appreciation, but never before in my life have they been accompanied by such a reunion. Although if it is the first meeting, I guess just… union. 

The family here is huge. In an earlier post, I said I would save you all the trouble of an extensive dive into our family genealogy, and I still don’t think I could write it out in a way that would compel anyone to continue reading, but put shortly, I am uniting my dad with his cousins, and their families.

My grandfather’s brother lived in Syria almost his whole life and raised his children there. Over the course of the past 12 years, as the Syrian civil war raged through the country, the family has slowly moved to Yerevan, with the youngest daughter and her family moving here just weeks ago after the fall of the Assad regime. (I have more thoughts about this issue, but I will save them for another post)

This means that, just in time for the holidays, the already large family has grown again… time to learn a bunch of new names.

Growing up, I always had some sort of a fantasy about what it would be like to have a huge family, especially around these times.

Holidays with my mother’s family were always magical growing up. That was the biggest sense of family I knew, and I loved having all the aunts, uncles, and cousins around. We would all be gathered in my grandparent’s house, with the adults moving about the kitchen or settled in the living room and the cousins chasing each other around the house or downstairs in the basement playing pool with our grandfather.

This year, I am experiencing a different culture of Christmas and with it, a different scale of family gathering. Our Christmas gathering (which is celebrated here on the 31st and for the following week +) will include over 40 people, all from different pockets of the family, most of whom my father and I have a blood relation to and some of which we are related to by law.

In the meantime, I am wandering through endless Christmas markets filled with some of the most important Armenian objects; rugs, Jazve (Armenian Coffee pots), scarves, chess boards, and pottery. The vendors share in the excitement of the season and are always happy to help me find the perfect gifts. It is, honestly, the best spirits I have seen the city in since my arrival.

As I wait for the holiday festivities to truly begin, I have also been exploring cities around Yerevan. Below are some pictures from Gyumri, one of my favorite cities in Armenia. Gyumri was hit very hard by the earthquake in the late 20th century and has a much lower level of tourism than Yerevan. These factors have led to it still having plenty of cool old abandoned buildings that have not yet been restored and instead have been designated “perfect exploration spots for Drew” or “hazardous”… depending on who you ask.

I am still studying Armenian, and little by little I am inching my way into the language. My comprehension skills have increased, and I can ask for most of the things I need in the grocery store, as well as directions to the bus, so I’m not sure what else I even need 🙂 Many people, Armenians included, wonder why I am trying to learn such a complicated language with such little application. I still struggle to answer this question, but there is some deep importance in it to me, and it is one of the big factors that has kept me here thus far. Soon I will travel on, but I would like to keep learning Armenian and continue to increase my fluency in the language.

Anyways, that’s all for now, just a little update on all of the excitement. Wishing you all the best and a merry holiday of your choosing.

Drew