By: Maya Barillas Mohan, Staff Writer
“Pura vida” is the unofficial national motto of laid-back, cloudless Costa Rica. It is the one-size-fits-all response to life’s greatest satisfactions: good food, weather, and company. Because Costa Rica is 10 degrees from the equator, it gets 12 hours of daylight starting just after 5:00 a.m. Locals wake up with the sun and have lengthy coffee breaks. “Puntualidad” is not a high-mileage word in this language.
The Costa Rica I visited annually since I was small was detached from the hubbub in the capital, and I was allowed to teeter across the streets unsupervised to buy syrupy mangoes at my leisure. Fashion trends in shops lagged behind what the malls back home sold, and buildings were painted tropical hues that bordered on gaudy. An upbringing exposed to North American tastes rendered Central America rustic to me. Costa Rica was affectionately a time capsule where people still held newspapers at arms’ length on park benches and the Toyota Echo, discontinued in 2005, persisted.
Visits to my dad’s hometown became shorter, summertime affairs to accommodate school holidays, and then tapered in frequency. Canadian Christmas at home felt like a perfect postcard, anyway; waking up to see a thirty-foot evergreen doused in fresh snow is almost beyond Hallmark parody.
The last Christmas I spent in Costa Rica, in 2013, my parents and I lived in New York. We brought six iPads and a Mac desktop monitor as gifts. It had been my dad’s way of showing his family how good America was treating him. The lavish gifts were patriotic; the “American Dream” of surplus, realized! Now, in the waning 2025, I ask my uncle if he still remembers. His face splits open into a smile visible through creased eyes in the rearview mirror. “We still have the monitor,” he says. Pura vida intact, I think to myself, briefly ashamed of the impatience I have for my own technology.
Pitch black outside, I fall into an oblivious sleep. Once out of the hermetic ride from the airport, I am disturbed to see that Christmas in Costa Rica seems to have become a lurid, LED-riddled commercial event. Harsh blue icicles flicker dizzyingly and entire panels of wrought-iron gates are wrapped in infinite twinkling bulbs coloured red, yellow, green, and white. Open-air sitting rooms supplement rustic nativity scenes with light displays mimicking snowflakes falling.
Costa Rica is not a culture that has a Santa Claus. (Good) children have always been delivered presents from Niño Dios (Baby Jesus), with some leaving polite letters in their nativity scenes, a Catholic tradition. Cement houses are now complete with 6-foot inflatable Santa Clauses, and some of the fancy ones are motorized to dance under the hot breeze. Santa is not equipped with a weather-appropriate wardrobe. He dons a fur-trimmed suit but never breaks a sweat, acclimatizing to his new home with ease despite sticking out like a sore, red thumb.
Set beside the evergreen nativity scene, a neighbour flaunts a tinsel Rudolph. Before the literal bells and whistles, Christmas had been primarily a celebration to congregate within family potlucks and attend Misa de Gallo (Midnight Mass). We brought a fruitcake one year and it was met with the amusement of a posh dog breed, its existence curious. Western traditions supplement Costa Rican ones, not supplanting them; my family still made a seemingly endless supply of tamales.
Perusing the market, every Canadian novelty has an attempted counterpart. It’s never been easier to dress up like a North American. Crowds choke sidewalks and traffic looks like string lights in the hilly distance. High-sheen Hyundais and Fords are cramming the battered Suzukis off the narrow, twisty roads, and crossing the street requires more faith than it used to. My Christmas visit is a microcosmic reflection of a greater development I never even considered prior.
My dad’s hometown seems to reject its desired modernity like one might get a fever after a tattoo.
The commercial side of Christmas is a symptom of North American sensibilities I never found all that sensible, but here it was. Shopping in Sarchi, a district popular for kitschy trinkets and artisan wood furniture, I braced myself for a mini version of Pacific Centre in place of the warehouses stocked with hand-painted glasses and wood inlay cutting boards. Luckily, all the whimsical and sometimes lopsided local-made souvenirs were still available in scores. Isn’t it ironic that my most expensive purchase was a glistening plaque emblazoned with that homely motto “Pura vida?”
Merging North American and Latin American sensibilities should overthrow me with joy as someone who is a product of both cultures. I feel on edge instead. Costa Rica’s appetite for North American trends seems to be growing faster than it can keep up with. A sleek McDonald’s now stands arrogantly. The inclusion of a McPinto, a McVersion of a traditional beans and rice dish, seems mocking.
