Back in Romania – Impressions

I guess spending is a common practice for Xmas all over the world but as i notice now, when it comes to Romanians Xmas is all about spending, but not spending to have something, spending to have the same or more than the neighbor. I have the feeling that tradition is so much stable here that it does not matter how much you have to spend you need to have all the traditional elements of Xmas and more to feel comfortable during this holiday. For example, you need to have in your house 1/4 of a pig at least, traditional food like “leber”, “toba”, sausages (home made), wine, “tuica”, “cozonac”, “sarmale”, traditional sups, boef salad, etc etc, and all this in huge quantities so you can show that you can afford even if you cannot…

10-15 years ago you did not need to buy all all this products or ingredients in order to have them for X mas as most of Romanians had relatives in the country side or were doing agriculture or so, and this products were available in the back closet, but now most of the Romanians are buying all this products from the stores, hypermarkets, mega markets, supermarkets, gigamarkets, XXLmarkets, city markets and all the other markets.

We use to say that Americans are consumers, living in a consumer market, but Romanians are by definition consumers, being driven by culture, traditions and show off mentality.

Some Romanians are taking credits just for this (Thank God for the economic crisis), some are saving for some months some for the all year, but in the end the money end up being spent in December.

Rhetorical: Do we really need all this  spending to have a nice Xmas with the family? or did we lost the meaning of Xmas? By the way, what is the spirit of Xmas now days? is it still related with Family values?