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Twisting Traditions

         As likely EVERY ONE of you other Fellows has been experiencing this month, the holiday season is not a very easy time to be this far away from home. I have missed home the whole time I have been gone, but this time of year brings just about as much “saudade”(a Portuguese word that basically means missing and longing) as I can possibly stand. I had been missing singing Christmas carols that I was familiar with, the cold weather, and, more than anything, my family’s never-failing tradition of making, frosting, and decorating homemade sugar cookies and sharing them with our friends. After about 2 weeks of feeling like a hollow shell in a lonesome wood, I decided, with the help of my mother via Facebook chat, to bring the ol’ cookie tradition down south for the winter. And so, the journey began.

          After a good hour of translating all the words for the ingredients in the recipe that I would need, I walked through the plaza, past the hissing group of moto-taxi drivers, and down the road to Cunha, the local market here in Sao Fran. Sugar cookies aren’t a big thing here in Brazil, so I was a little worried that the market wouldn’t have all of the ingredients. Turns out my worst nightmare had come true. Just trickin’, it wasn’t that bad of a nightmare, but the market didn’t have powdered sugar, vanilla extract, or food dye. Frustrated that my homesickness would never be put to rest by way of the cookies, I stormed out of the store, leaving all the other ingredients behind, and walked home sadly in the rain.

     Upon arriving home and speaking with my host mother, I found that Google Translate was simply a massive problem, and that here in Brazil they just have different names for the things for which I was looking. We went to another market, found the missing ingredients, and were ready for action. The sun peeked out from behind a dark grey cloud, and shone upon the wondrous situation.

  After approximately 8 requests from my adorable host niece Adriele to “fazer os biscoitos” (make the cookies), I finally wrote down the recipe from my mother and was ready to begin making the dough…or so I thought, until I remembered the United States fantastic decision to use the Imperial system of measurement. Back to the computer I went, to convert every one of the ingredients into metric units.

To be real it wasn’t that big of a hassle, and it was all 100% worth it – not only to make my little niece happy, but to bring my family tradition here into my Brazilian home and satisfy the lack of holiday spirit that I had been feeling. And just as is to be expected, things had a little GCY twist to them. White frosting due to no food dye, no sprinkles since all stores are closed on Sundays, and of course, because not a single store in the mall carried a rolling pin, rolling out the cookie dough with our trusty Global Citizen Year water bottle.

Happy Holidays my loves, make them amazing.

🙂

Floury hands and good times 🙂
Holli Sullivan

About Holli Sullivan


An artist at heart, Holli’s two deepest interests are singing and photography, though she also enjoys acting in school plays and playing the guitar. She has been a vocal performer for eight years and now spends much of her time capturing images and telling stories through her lens. Voted President of her school’s Spanish Club, Holli recently led her class on a trip to Mexico and has also visited Brazil and Costa Rica.

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