Day 232 - Three Vernal Bear Days in Barbados

The Vernal Bear Day Bears in Barbados

The embassy in Barbados was much larger than the embassy in Qatar or the consulate general in Stuttgart, so I looked forward to observing Vernal Bear Day with a larger number of people. In addition, through our son we had met members of the British High Commission and somewhere along the way we also met Carol from the Canadian High Commission, enlarging the pool of people who might just be willing to act childlike for a Sunday afternoon.

The first year, I focused on inviting people who didn't have children, or at least didn't have children in Barbados, so that the reason for the holiday - to give adults who want to enjoy the discovery of spring time traditions - could be observed. But since I couldn't count myself among the childless any longer, we extended the invitation to those with children around our son's age as well.

Valerie and Margaret at Vernal Bear Day Brunch in Barbados

The first year the Vernal Bear Day brunch was a time of discovery for most of the participants. Each person or couple arrived with a basket prepared according to the rules I had distributed in a shopping bag, a garbage bag, a waste basket, or a box as the disguise. I told them they now should find a hiding place within the first floor of our house for their disguised basket.

After brunch we drew numbers from a hat to determine who would go first to find a hidden basket. The finder then uncovered the basket and investigated the contents to be sure nothing had to be confiscated (no bunnies allowed; chicks are optional). The rotation then followed with the person whose basket had just been found going next. And so it went until all the baskets had been found and opened. That was about all there was to the event, but I know everyone had a good time.

The next year, some of those who had attended the first year had moved on and there were a few newcomers, including the ambassador and his wife as well as the DCM, but now there were many more enthusiasts to share the instructions of what makes a suitable Vernal Bear Day basket. A couple of people had friends in town who also joined us for brunch and the discovery of the baskets. Again, the event took up about three hours for brunch followed by the basket hunt. And everyone enjoyed themselves.

The third year, my last spring in Barbados although I didn't yet know it, things were a little different. This was during the several months when I was serving as the acting management officer and the political section chief was serving as the acting deputy chief of mission. On that weekend, the ambassador was out of the country and out of his area of responsibility. That meant the acting DCM was in fact the acting ambassador or chargé d'affaires. The ambassador planned to return to Barbados Sunday morning, so he and his wife could attend Vernal Bear Day. The political section chief/acting deputy chief of mission/chargé d'affaires wasn't among my circle of friends, so I hadn't invited him and his wife to brunch.

Barbro brought her own bear to the party

The Saturday evening before Vernal Bear Day, about 10 p.m., John, the regional security officer (RSO), called me at home to let me know there had been an incident at the chargé's home. He wanted me to know about it before the ambassador returned and he thought it would be a good idea for me to accompany him to the airport when the ambassador's plane arrived.

The chargé's home was quite a distance from Bridgetown and also quite a distance from any neighbors. This was a deliberate choice on their part because his wife was an opera singer who wanted to practice every day.  They had learned from previous assignments that as much as people loved her voice in a concert, neighbors were not so thrilled to be within earshot for the many hours a day she practiced. So they lived quite an isolated life.

Their home was surrounded by sugar cane fields. Sugar cane doesn't have an annual growth cycle like most crops I am familiar with. There is cane at all stages of development at all times of the year. It appeared to me that it took about 18 months for the cane to grow to the point it was ready for harvesting, so fields were being harvested right next to fields that just been planted. Harvesting had just begun on a field close to the charge's home. What had been 15-foot tall stands of cane were being cut down to stubble.

Image of sugar cane fields ready to be harvested
by Enrico Rubboli, via Flickr.com

Those tall stands of sugar cane had been the hiding place for the previous year of one of four convicted murderers who had escaped from prison. Just how motivated the police were to recapture the four was a subject of many rumors since one of the men came from a prominent family. Most people assumed that all four of them had managed to stow away on one of the many banana boats that came into the harbor regularly. There wasn't a lot of effort going into finding them.

A few weeks earlier, the chargé had noticed that some of the cardboard packing boxes his family had put into their carport had disappeared. But he didn't think too much about it. He thought some kids might have picked up the cardboard to recycle or to play with. But on the Saturday evening, just as it was getting dark, his son mentioned that he thought someone was in the carport. The chargé went out to investigate. He found himself face-to-face with one of the four convicted murderers with a sawed-off shotgun pointed at him. The intruder insisted that the chargé get down on his knees behind his car with his hands behind his head and to keep quiet. The felon hit him on the back of his head with the butt of the shotgun to ensure the chargé complied.

The felon grabbed a few more things from the carport and took off, leaving the chargé and his family shaken, but not badly hurt. They called the RSO who called the Marine Security Guard Detachment Commander who rounded up the Marines who weren't on duty to travel with him out to the house. By the time they got there, the Barbados Police were also at the chargé's house, stamping around in the cane fields, looking for the felon. They found the makeshift shelter he had constructed from the cardboard packing boxes, but once again the felon managed to get away, but not before one of the policemen shot another of the policemen by accident.

That's why the RSO thought we should both be at the airport in the morning to meet the ambassador. John picked me up at home the next morning. He had a copy of the morning edition of the local newspaper with the headline, "Policeman shot at U.S. diplomat's home." John thought the ambassador should get the full story from us rather than seeing the headline in the airport.

The ambassador knew something was up when there were two of us to meet him.

"What are you two doing here?" he asked.

Vicki and the ambassador at Vernal Bear Day brunch
in Barbados

In contrast to the insistence on protocol by the ambassador in Qatar, the ambassador in Barbados had just the right balance of formality when it was necessary and being down-to-earth when it was appropriate. The ambassador knew his driver would be outside the airport waiting to take him home, but he didn't insist that the DCM or any other embassy official escort him to and from the airport.

After John finished explaining what had happened and the ambassador was satisfied that no one from the embassy was seriously hurt, I asked him if he thought I should postpone Vernal Bear Day.

"Whatever for?" he responded. "Do you need help with the preparations?"

I assured him everything would be ready.

"Then Vicki and I will be there on time," he replied.

That final Vernal Bear Day brunch went quite normally with only the discussion of the events the evening before marking it as somewhat unusual.

Day 205 - Vernal Bear Day

Before I left Minneapolis to begin my Foreign Service career, I was introduced to a personal holiday by my friend Thom, Vernal Bear Day. Thom and his ex-wife created the holiday for themselves since they enjoyed the memory of children's holiday activities such as exchanging Valentines in February, looking for Easter baskets in March or April, and exchanging May baskets, but they had no children to share those holidays. Vernal Bear Day was the solution. On a Sunday in the spring, not necessarily on a fixed date (it was, after all, a personal holiday) they would exchange Vernal Bear Day baskets.

The rules for what to include in a Vernal Bear Day basket were simple:

Vernal Bear Day in Germany

• There must be bears.
• There must be chocolate.
• There may be flowers.
• No bunnies are allowed.
• Chickies and peeps are optional.

When Thom and his ex split up, Thom and I observed the holiday while I was still in the U.S. Once I arrived in Germany and the space shuttle blew up, I began to share the holiday with my colleagues.

The first year in Germany, a friend from Romania, Gayle, was in town the weekend I had had invited my friends to celebrate. Together, Gayle and I created a basket for everyone and we hid them around my apartment. My guests arrived for brunch and we took turns looking for the hidden baskets.

Vernal Bear Day Loot in Qatar

The next year, since I now had photos to show everyone what a Vernal Bear Day basket looked like, I invited friends, some from the year before and some new, and this time asked that they bring a basket to hide, but with the additional twist that each basket should be brought in disguise or hidden in a bag or box. That became the pattern in the future.

The first spring in Doha, I invited all the Americans at the embassy to a Vernal Bear Day brunch. All the Americans, including the ambassador and his wife. I found birthday party invitations that had a bear on the front with the words, Come to a Bear Day Party which I modified with a caret between a and Bear to add Vernal above. I gave everyone the rules and looked forward to how the baskets turned out.

One of the guests was an extra - a sailor in town to make arrangements for an upcoming ship visit. He was one of those TDYers we included in all our socializing and entertaining. He won the most creative basket award, if I had decided there would be such an award. His basket consisted of a box of alfalfa sprouts as the Easter grass substitute with a stuffed teddy bear and chocolate bars on top.

That first Vernal Bear Day in Doha was most memorable because of the ambassador's reaction to it all. He kept mentioning that he had never heard of the holiday before. I must have told him ten times that no one had heard of it before because it was a personal holiday. It never seemed to sink in.

That wasn't the last time the ambassador and I experienced a failure to communicate.

Say 160 - Independence Day

Independence Day image by Watson
Media, via Flickr.com

Celebrating Independence Day overseas is very important at U.S. embassies. Each country observes a national day. July 4 is ours.

During my 22 years as a Foreign Service Officer, how embassies observed July 4 changed, reflecting the change in security situations around the world.

American citizens overseas seemed to believe they should all be invited to these events, but that isn't the purpose of the funds used to pay for them. They are formal, official, and representational. Many embassies schedule a second, informal and unofficial event for Americans resident in the country to observe July 4.

My first July 4 overseas as a State Department employee was in Germany in 1986 where we celebrated at a reception in the afternoon at the Consul General's home. Most of the guests were Germans or representatives of other diplomatic missions in Stuttgart. All the staff of the embassy or consulate are on duty at these events; they are not entertainment for staff. They are work.

Two years later, in 1988, I was in Doha, Qatar, where we had planned the reception at a hotel on July 4, but then, the day before on July 3, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Gulf that has two names, on the Bandar Abbas-Dubai route. We spent July 3 calling everyone we had invited to let them know the event was being postponed until later in the year. Instead of observing Independence Day as our national day that year, we observed the date in September that was the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.

The following year, 1989, we observed national day early, in June. Some countries in the Middle East held their national day receptions in February, around Presidents Day, when the weather on the Arabian Penninsula was mild enough for the receptions to be held outside. Temperatures in July were often well above 100 degrees, making an outdoor event dangerous as well as very uncomfortable. June was too late for an outdoor reception, so the reception was again in a hotel. The ambassador couldn't use the explanation that it was too hot to observe national day in July. I always thought the reason we held the event in June was that the ambassador knew he would be leaving Qatar before July 4.  His term was ending on June 30.

In 1990, the U.S. Embassy in Barbados held its official reception on July 4 at the Ambassador's residence. The weekend before, the North American community resident in Barbados observed both Canada Day and July 4 at a hotel on the beach. That event turned out to be memorable for a very different reason. The owner of the hotel was an American who was under indictment for mail fraud. His arrest was scheduled for the following day, postponed because of our event. He had done his research and found there was no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Barbados, so he thought he was safe there. His research wasn't thorough enough, however, since an existant treaty between the U.S. and the U.K., signed before the U.K. granted Barbados its independence in 1966, applies between the U.S. and Barbados. The day after our beach party, a photo of the owner of the hotel, handcuffed, being escorted out of the hotel was on the front page of the newspaper.

In 1993 and 1994, when we were in Moldova, the number of resident Americans was limited to just those of us at the embassy, the staff and the construction workers in the country to ugrade the buildings on the grounds of the embassy compound. We held official events for our Moldovan contacts and other diplomats. And, like in Stuttgart, we held a separate, informal, event for the staff and American workers. At one of those events, the ambassador posed for photos with some of the workers, sitting in the side car of the motorcycle one of them had bought to get around town. She was quite a lady.

July 4, 1996, we were back in Washington, D.C. We observed the fireworks on thr Mall that year from the 8th floor of the State Department building. We not only saw and heard the fireworks from that vantage point; we felt them.

We were in Abu Dhabi from 1996 to 1999. We arrived just after bombings of Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and we lived through the aftermath of the east African bombings. July 4 observations seriously changed after those events. Even the informal, just for Americans residents in the country, events featured walk-through metal detectors at all entrances. Guards were posted everywhere. No one was allowed into the venue without presenting an invitation and identification to prove the invitation was theirs.

My final national day celebration overseas was in Sana'a where we observed the event in a very unorthodox way: we painted a school for children with disabilities. The ambassador had established this pattern previously. She felt that the several hundred dollars needed for food and drinks to be consumed in an evening would be better spent doing something to improve the lives of Yemenis. She received approval to spend the representational funds on paint, brushes, and other supplies and on the day, we staff members who would have had to work at a reception got our hands dirty doing a different type of work.

We didn't need walk-through metal detectors for that one.

Warming Up - Exercise 7

Rituals – Why We Need Them

Do we really have to put up a Christmas tree this year?  We won’t even be home to enjoy it.

I’ve heard this thought a couple of times.  I’ve even said it myself.  In fact, the version I spoke was more a statement than a question.  My then-husband and I planned to spend the Christmas holiday with my family in northern Minnesota.  Being ever so practical, I told my husband that it didn’t make any sense to put up a tree that year.  And since I had already come to that very sensible conclusion, there wasn’t much room for my husband to provide his counter arguments.  We didn’t put up a tree that year.

It wasn’t until after the holiday that he told me he felt cheated that year.  We spent the holidays with my Scandinavian family where we ate buttered lefse sprinkled with sugar on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and every other day spent at my parents’ home, but there was nothing of his Romanian traditions – no whiskey shots before each meal, no Romanian carols.  There was nothing that meant Christmas to him.  Once I realized how important the elements of tradition – the ritual of the holiday – were to him, I also realized that by not putting up a tree, I robbed both of us of an opportunity to establish some of our own uniquely Scandinavian/American-Romanian/Canadian traditions. 

Since my practical nature is likely due in large measure to the influence of my practical parents, I wasn’t surprised one Thanksgiving to hear my father say he didn’t think it was necessary for him to put up a Christmas tree that year.  It was the first Christmas after my mother’s passing the previous January.  Her death came just days after the previous year’s Christmas tree had been taken down and stored away.  I had already decided that we kids would put up the tree, lights and decorations for my father before I returned to Washington.  And that we did – most of the decorations were placed by me – Dad’s oldest child – and three-year-old Megan – Dad’s youngest grandchild.

The next year, I traveled back to Minnesota again for Christmas.  This time, my husband traveled with me.  And our son traveled to England to spend the holidays with his English relatives.  So again, I wasn’t surprised when my very practical husband pointed out that he didn’t think we needed to put up the tree that year since no one would be home on Christmas anyway.  He was a little surprised to hear me laugh so loudly in response to the idea – I couldn’t help but think of the contrast to the time so many years ago when I first said the same thing.  It felt good to know that my husband and I share that practical streak.  But since our family consists of three, I advised him that we need to know how our son would feel about skipping the tradition.  Our son’s response was that well, yes, it wasn’t necessary for us to put up the tree, especially since he’ll be gone for two weeks and we’ll be gone for eight days.  But he added that it wouldn’t be Christmas without a tree, even if was no one would be at home.


We put up the tree that week.

Warming Up - Exercise 3

To Sandy, From Henry

About his paintings, Norman Rockwell said, "The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be." 

I selected this quotation because I grew up in Norman Rockwell’s small town America, where celebrating Christmas was never sordid or ugly. This is a Christmas story, but its lessons could come from any holiday in any place or time.  To begin, here’s an outline of a typical Christmas from my childhood:

By Christmas Eve, the pile of presents under the tree had grown beyond the tree’s circumference.  In the late afternoon, we would have a light meal, to tide us over until later.  After that meal, we six kids were allowed to pick out one present each to open. With that done, we would pack ourselves into the car for the drive to Grandma and Grandpa’s house where all the aunts, uncles, and cousins would meet up.  Grandpa and Grandma had 36 grandchildren so the house was well filled by the time we all arrived.

Once there, we’d eat the real evening meal.  

In no time, the suspense had grown nearly as high as the pile of presents under Grandpa and Grandma’s tree. But we had to wait until Santa arrived to hand out the presents.  Santa was usually Uncle Marvin, dressed in a remarkably awful Santa suit that didn’t fool any of us.  We made a game of seeing who would first notice that Marvin was no longer in the room.  His absence meant Santa would arrive soon.  Once Santa arrived, there was great jostling to see whose present would be passed out first. 

Once the presents were opened, we spent an appropriate amount of time playing with the toys before we all headed home late in the evening.

At home, my brothers, sister and I got to open the rest of the presents under the tree.  In the morning, there would be more presents, this time from Santa.  That was our ritual, our celebration of Christmas as a nuclear – and extended – family. 

But when I turned 12, the routine changed slightly.  Grandpa and Grandma started spending the winters in Arizona.  With Grandpa and Grandma no longer in town for Christmas, Mom and her siblings rotated hosting the family on Christmas Eve.  That’s how we ended up one year for my special Christmas at Uncle Marvin’s house.

Uncle Marvin lived on the farm that had been home for Mom and her siblings while they grew up.  That house had more memories for their generation than the house in town that we cousins thought of as Grandma’s.  So it was appropriate that a special gift was waiting there that year.

When my family arrived at Uncle Marvin’s house, nearly all the cousins who were old enough to walk and talk ran out to the car with one question – “Who is Henry?”  And they were all asking me that question.  But I had no idea what they were talking about.

They nearly dragged me into the house and up to the tree to point to the envelope laying on one of the boughs.  “To Sandy, from Henry” was written on the envelope. I had NO IDEA who Henry was.

For the first time ever, there wasn’t any competition about which present should be handed out first.  Everyone wanted to know what was in the envelope from Henry.  When Santa handed me the envelope, every eye followed his hand.  I opened the envelope; I pulled out a locket on a chain.  And nothing else.  I still didn’t know who Henry was. 

Then I heard my mother laugh.  She turned and pointed at her baby sister, LaVerne, and explained to those few who didn’t already know that Henry had been her boyfriend before she met my father.  Henry had given her the locket for Christmas.  When Mom met Dad, she gave the locket to LaVerne.  LaVerne kept it until Mom’s oldest daughter – that’s me – turned 13.  And LaVerne decided it was time for the locket to be passed on - from Henry, to Sandy.

When I got married, I gave the locket to my sister, Joan.  And I never gave it another thought, until Joan and I found it in my mother’s jewelry box after she died.  As Joan and I stared at it in the box, we realized immediately that we needed to pass it on - again.

You see, even though Mom married Dad and not Henry, Henry had become part of our family.  Henry’s daughter, Kathy, married Mom’s nephew, David, making Henry my cousin’s father-in-law.  And Dad’s best friend, Norman, had a sister who was Henry’s wife, making Norman Kathy’s uncle.  A few weeks later, when Kathy and David invited Dad and Norman for dinner, the two of them delivered the locket to Kathy, to return it to the family.

LaVerne, Mom, and Henry died within four months of one another.  But every Christmas, they are with me in the story of the envelope labeled, “To Sandy, from Henry.”

Since I opened with a quotation, let me also close with one, from Clara Ortega, that sums up my special family Christmas.

“To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other's hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time.”

May all your holidays be blessed with rich family traditions at all holidays.