A variant Guyanese Father Christmas story

Dec 25, 2016 News

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By Dennis Nichols
Many years ago there was a young Guyanese boy who believed in magic; not the rabbit-out-of-a-hat kind

he’d read about in fanciful tales, or the school magician pulling yards of coloured paper from his mouth. That was fun magic. No, strangely enough, the kind he believed in was mirrored in the shadowy world of folklore myth and mystery. And though a childish thing, it was real enough to produce results like having a chubby, pink-faced godfather fly in from the North Pole on Christmas Eve and deposit a gift-wrapped fire truck and a copy of ‘The Adventures of Odysseus’ under a sparkly green tree.
In nineteen-sixties Guyana, the boy’s father worked at Bookers on Water Street as a trucker. His mother had four other siblings, younger than him, and she worked as a housewife, full time. Then one year, a month before Christmas, the boy’s father died suddenly in an accident on the wharf. As ‘Poverty was his middle name’ Bookers helped pay his funeral expenses. The company conveyed sympathy and two weeks’ pay to his family. Its wharf operations didn’t miss a beat because business was business and 40 year-old labourers were a dollar a dozen. Relatives helped out financially, but poverty was endemic to every ‘Auntie’, ‘Uncle’, and ‘Cousin’ whose few dollars could be stretched only so far.
Words are inadequate to describe the mood of that household, as the first three weeks of December rolled by. Grief, anger, and hopelessness reigned equally. The woman’s tears came daily and often without warning. A worn apron doubled as a handkerchief to wipe them away. Bare bread and cocoa ‘tea’, milk-less corn meal porridge and shine rice were daily fare. In sombre frame of mind the boy even forgot to remember his tenth birthday a week before Christmas, and a certain musical instrument his father had promised to get him as a birthday gift.
I said that the boy believed in magic, but he’d forgotten that too, until Christmas Eve. That night the woman dressed her children in their fanciest clean clothes, and took them window shopping – plodding the pavement in downtown Georgetown, looking through glass windows at things she could never afford to buy. For an hour or two, fantasy filled the void of hopelessness as imagination wove its transportive spell around her. They watched all the new and shiny things on display, the cheapest of which were still far beyond her means to acquire.
Then the boy remembered something. It was Christmas Eve, and there was a man who he had once heard described as the godfather of all children everywhere. His name was Father Christmas, and he lived at the North Pole. He had millions of toys and gifts to give to well-behaved children on Christmas Eve. Travelling through the night on a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, he was magically able to visit all the children whose names were on a list he carried with him. Hope swelled in the boy’s heart, and through the stifled pain he felt there, it was given voice, plaintive and wistful.
“Mama, please tell Father Christmas to bring a trumpet for me.” Even as the words left his mouth he could feel tears welling up in his eyes as he remembered his father and the promise of a birthday gift.
Twice he repeated the request and twice his mother looked at him in helpless silence. Finally she told him it was getting late and they had to get home. The streets were becoming deserted, but there were a few stragglers still taking in the sights and sounds of a colonial Guyanese Christmas.
One of them, a rather nondescript middle-aged man, fairly well-dressed, overheard the lad’s plea and his heart was touched by the obvious plight the mother found herself in. He approached her with an offer to help which the woman, though initially suspicious of his intentions and conscious of her own pride, accepted after a while. Lack of any other realistic option forced her to take from him two crisp $20 notes.
Later that night as the children slept and the woman pondered over what had transpired earlier, there was a knock on her door. Although she couldn’t fathom why, she was half-expecting him. The man, without the slightest fuss or hint of condescension, handed her an oblong gift-wrapped box. Immediately she knew what it was, and for whom. He also gave her a large bag filled with food items and a few toys. Gratitude swelled inside her and tears threatened to spill out, but she managed to keep her composure as she thanked him for his generosity and thoughtfulness, although she couldn’t imagine where he’d gotten them from at that time of night.
Needless to say the next morning was a bittersweet one for the family. It was the first without husband and father, but it was also the first in a long time that there would be enough to eat for the rest of the season, and the new year would not find the mother penniless. The children had an unaccustomed hearty breakfast after which they played with the toys, none more so than the oldest boy, fascinated to the point of awe when he realized it was no toy, but a real miniature trumpet that could be blown like the real thing. It was the sweetest sound in all the world.
That Christmas morning as the children delighted themselves with their newly-acquired treasures, the woman was struck by a sudden realization; how did the stranger know where she lived? She hadn’t given him her address and she knew it was impossible for him, not even knowing her name, to find out from anyone at that time of night where she lived. She shared her perplexity with her trumpet boy and he smiled, knowingly. After all, the harsh world he lived in was nevertheless inhabited by characters of mystery and revelation who seem to have unchallenged access to the minds and hearts of children. They never saw the man again.
So it seems like Father Christmas doesn’t always have to be a chubby, pink-faced godfather from the North Pole. And about the time when this story happened, a Trinidadian calypsonian named Nap Hepburn sang a poignant Christmas song titled ‘Tell Santa Claus’. It was about a poor woman and her son, both barefoot on the street one Christmas Eve in Port-of-Spain, and of a stranger who intervened after hearing the boy plead with his mother, “Listen Mama, I want you to tell Santa Claus, to bring a trumpet and a concertina for me …”
Well, I don’t know how much you believe in magic, coincidences, and angelic Christmas dads who intervene on behalf of fatherless children, but I do know this story is true. Nap Hepburn knew it too, at least his Trinidadian version, forever memorialized in a 50 year-old Christmas song you may be privileged to hear before the season is over. But whether believer or skeptic, child, adult or in-between, have yourself a merry (and melodious) Christmas anyway!

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