Stay Inside Or the Devil's Gonna Get You

I've decided to use my advanced English conversation classes to exploit the cultural differences and similarities between our two societies. I'm noticing that the general framework of things like wedding traditions and scare tactics targeted at children are about the same for the both of us, but differ slightly regarding their purpose and execution. For instance, in Argentina the bride will throw her bouquet to the ladies in the reception and the one who catches it will be the next to get married. Then to include the others the groom will take one (of the many) garter belts off his bride's leg and hand it to a single guy, next the bride takes off the following belt and hands it to a single lady and the two recipients are meant to make of it what they will *wink wink*. Next, because the ladies can't have all the fun, the groom assembles all the lads behind him and chucks a full bottle of whisky over his shoulder and the guy to catch it is the next to marry. I suppose they decided to do it this way because it's the only method they could think of to entice the guys to catch something that signified the end of their bachelorhood.

What made me cry with laughter however was a retelling one of my students gave about a trauma induced by her grandmother. Over in America or England to keep a child in bed you tell them that if they're out of their beds at midnight the Boogie Man is going to kidnap them. A slight variation on that threat exists here, and to understand its purpose I must first explain the importance of naps. Here in Buenos Aires people do not nap in the middle of the day because the regular work hours are from 8am to 5pm. Out in the provinces the nap is held sacred because work goes from 6am to 1pm, then people break for lunch and a nap and return to work from 4pm to 8 or 9. Dinner is eaten at 10 and no one gets into bed before 1 am. Ergo, a nap is desperately needed in the middle of the day for these sleep deprived provincial people. My student's grandmother came to Buenos Aires when she was 19 and still to this day the woman cannot eat a meal while the sun is high in the sky without passing out for an hour or two afterwards. So when she used to come over to babysit for my student she had to device a way to keep her young grandchildren in the house while she napped. Apparently the method of choice amongst sleepy grandparents is to tell the young ones that in the middle of the day, from about 1 to about 3, the devil paces back and forth in front of their house and if they set foot outside he is going to snatch them up and take them away from their loving parents to spend eternity in hell. In this way a grandparent can rest sure in the knowledge that their grandchildren are upstairs too busy cowering under the sheets to entertain any thoughts of playing outside without their permission. My student had minor panic attacks until she was about 12 whenever she had to go outside in the middle of the day.