I have the feeling again, and I like it

Dec 13, 2009 Features / Columnists, My Column

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Every year at this time I get a special feeling. It is not that I feel to give, although this is said to be the season of giving. Rather, it is the season when I feel extremely lazy, when I just want to lie in bed and read unless I have to do something that is necessary.
It is also a feeling of simply wanting to watch little children out from school and them not realizing that they are enjoying the best years of their lives. These days it seems as if there are not many children around; it is as though people have stopped making children. Perhaps the tools are just not there.
However, the few around often bring me joy. I watch them fashion toys from simple things. There are not affluent people where I live, so the children just cannot run into the shops for trifles. Indeed times are hard and they have always been hard for the poor. Yet these very poor people dream of making this one time of the year something to feel good about. Over the years they have always done so.
In my younger days, this season had a smell that was unique. It was the smell of fresh paint and varnish and wood dust. Asthma was probably not an issue because I saw so many of my peers in the various woodworking shops asking the joiner to make guns for them. And not one of them had an attack. Perhaps the stock was better.
Guns were the thing to have at Christmas. Ask any child who was born before 1960. Criminals did not have guns so parents did not have to worry about dreams imitating real life. They did not have to worry about producing gunmen, although that must have happened somewhere along the way.
I spent those early years between Beterverwagting and West Coast Demerara – at La Jalousie and Den Amstel , in the case of the latter. Guyana was not yet independent and Christianity was the predominant religion. All others were considered inferior and so Christmas was something that everyone celebrated—be they Hindu, Christian or Muslim.
I remember the itinerant joiner who would pass by in his cart, first of all trading some piece of furniture that someone had thrown out for something another person was throwing out. Indeed, the trade always involved money because the joiner always contended that his piece of furniture was more expensive than the one the other people were giving him. He had to make a living.
In the homes there was the scraping of furniture to remove the old varnish and then applying a fresh coat. Floors were also varnished. Lacquer was not heard of in my corner of the world. Paint was applied liberally to old walls and steps were scrubbed until they literally shone. In my home, steps and floors were scrubbed.
I do not have to do these things today but the feeling returns every year at this time. Some people call it nostalgia.
But there were other things that I still recall. We still have the masquerade dancers and I cannot help but give them something whenever I run into them. I was mortally afraid of them as a little boy and my shins have the marks to prove.
From the time I heard the drum, regardless of where I was I would begin a mad dash for home. The stilts man whom we called Long Lady and the bull cow (what a hermaphrodite) were enough to put the fear of God into any child and I was no exception. Of course the fear disappeared, but I don’t remember when.
One of the things that I still do as an adult is enjoy the rum. In those days rum was the only drink, except for the homemade wines which have disappeared.
This season also brings back other memories, some of them somewhat morbid. There was ‘Sponge Down’ who would collect a dead and place it on his bicycle and tow it miles along the West Demerara Public Road to a mortuary. I can’t recall seeing him doing that but then again, I could not know that the person on his bicycle was a corpse.
I still remember the older people talking about this and them recalling ‘Sponge Down’ talking to the corpse. “Steady youself. Is suh when you like drink too much.”
And there were the thieves. Gowar’s wife, Kairool, woke up one Christmas morning to find her big fowl cock missing. Her cussing was something to behold. She even invoked the demons to let the fowl cock crow in the thief’s belly.
That Christmas Day I had fowl curry and never realized that it was Kairool’s cock. It never crowed in my belly and I only knew years later when I joined my sisters and my mother for an old time gaff. That was when my mother let out her secret.
Suffice it to say that I did hear stories about stolen birds crowing in people’s belly. That would have been a most humorous experience.
My mother used a wet bag that Christmas Eve night to get the cock and she skinned it rather than pluck it. The skin and its feathers ended up on the La Jalousie foreshore in a pillow case.
I don’t need to steal hens and cocks but looking back, those simple things made the season worthwhile. Even my old mother laments that Christmas is not what it used to be. Nothing to steal, and surely no joy in doing the little things. Everything is bought, even the artificial flowers that my mother once made from crepe paper and cloth.

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