HOUSECLEANING : A CHRISTMAS TRADITION

An old Chamorro Christmas tradition was to clean the house, from top to bottom, a few days before the start of the Nobenan Niño (Christmas novena).

For nine days or nights, your living room would be full of people attending the nobena. In those days, family, friends and neighbors would come. No invitations were really needed. If neighbors heard Christmas hymns being sung at your house, they would just wander over there and enter. Families wanted that to happen, and thus they would encourage people to sing loudly, to let the whole neighborhood know that the house was having a nobena.

Children, especially, loved to attend the nobena. When children heard the nobena songs being sung, they would drop their sticks and balls in the streets where they were playing and run to the house having the nobena. The children all piled into the front of the belén (nativity scene), right on the floor.

I remember at our house all these kids my age, that I never knew existed, showing up in our living room for the nobena! I never saw them before on our street. But no one was turned away. Everyone was welcome to attend the nobena. The treats passed out after the nobena were another draw, but that is a subject for another post.

Because all these people would be showing up at the house, the house was cleaned before the start of the nobena. Of particular concern was the cleanliness of the floor, since the children would be sitting and kneeling on it. Many floors were made of wood, sometimes ifit wood, which were termite-resistent. Polishing the wooden floors was a top priority and it was done the old-fashioned way, using a dried, cut coconut husk. The fibers of the husk allowed a nice shine on the wood. One could use modern, store-bought polish with the coconut husk, or one could use old-fashioned coconut oil as the polishing agent. Just put your strongest foot on the husk and dance away!

From Mother Nature - a coconut husk floor brush

Put on your favorite dance record and work away!