Being away from my family at Christmas (and other family get-togethers) is definitely the worst part of working in Antarctica. Still, it was a festive holiday down here and I really appreciate everything everyone does here to try to make it a nice Christmas. We had 12 nights of Christmas-themed movies leading up to Christmas, a couple of people got together and made Christmas cards for everyone on station, my friend J the baker hung baked goodies from the frames of some of our doors on Christmas Eve night (when there was a (false) fire alarm at 7am on Christmas morning and we all stumbled out of our rooms to muster for our Emergency Response Teams, we ran right into them), and so on.
Last year, the store manager organized a Good Santa/Bad Santa Mall Photo session on Christmas Eve and people really seemed to enjoy that, so I did the same thing this year. I even managed to coerce SR into being in a picture. We didn't get a very good one, but it's better than nothing!
The South Pole tradition is an annual race called "Race Around the World," which starts and ends right by the geographic pole marker but does a 2-mile loop around the base and technically goes through every time zone on the planet, which is crazy to think about. People dress up in costumes to run/walk/snowmobile the circuit and it was great fun to help the people doing the timing at the finish line and see people coming in in their crazy get-ups.
My favorite costumes that are on the station are a polar bear costume and a penguin one. We all think these are hysterical because neither polar bears (North Pole only) nor penguins (need water, and we're not on the coast) exist here. But we like to set up weird pictures with both of them, such as this one where a polar bear is devouring its penguin prey, perhaps for the first time in recorded history.
And then in the evening of Christmas Day, there were two seatings of a special Christmas meal, which they manage to make really special despite the fact that it's in the same place as all of our other meals always are. Blocking out the windows, adding festive lighting, candles, wine stewards, and so on really makes it a nice night for everyone.
Merry Christmas!!
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