Oh! For the joys of Christmas

Dec 25, 2016 Features / Columnists, My Column

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Children would be waking up today to a well decorated home, unusual kitchen smells and happy mothers. Of course this would not always be the case, because there are those children who do not know the love of a parent.
Some of them are in homes specially designed for their cause, enjoying the love and care that their protectors would offer. These protectors would be supported by kind-hearted people who always try to share their goodness with the less fortunate. This always moves me, because it shows that there is a lot of goodness in this society.
One year I went to Dharm Shala at Christmas and I saw at least three families taking Christmas cheer. By no stretch of imagination would I consider these to be rich families, but like the widow in the Bible with her mite, they too gave. Such was the outpouring of goodness, that the proprietors of the home for the destitute actually begged people not to bring in any more food.
My late father was a resident of Uncle Eddie’s Home when I met him for the first time. This is a story that I told before, so there is no need to repeat it. But there it was that first Christmas when I took breakfast for him. My daughter was with me. Being a nurse, she was adept at caring for people, so she cleaned him up then we all shared what I had brought.
Our story did not end there, because for the first time in years he was taken to a home for the rest of the day. He kept crying and expressing regret that he never played a part in my upbringing, and I kept saying to him that life is not often what we did or should have done.
But I have pleasant memories of Christmas. That was the time when my mother would string up new blinds and paper decorations. Plastic flowers were not yet in vogue and where I spent my early years did not have electricity. Today electricity is a given.
Beterverwagting did not get electricity until 1965. I vividly remember the first time the lights went on that night. People had been using flambeaux and gas lanterns—Tilley, Coleman and the like. As soon as they got light they tossed those things out but they rushed to retrieve them, some from the yard, when the first blackout hit a few weeks later.
Yet the greatest joy was not only Christmas Day with me and my friends running around with our cap guns and playing cops and robbers. Guns are off the gift list, because in the face of crime decades ago when guns made their appearance on the streets, parents in Guyana, collectively, refused to buy any. And of course the shops stopped importing them. Many alive today do not know what a cap pistol is.
And as these memories came flooding back, I could not forget the madness of Christmas Eve. In Georgetown the crowded streets are a common sight. Yesterday, driving in downtown Georgetown was a nightmare. The bumper to bumper traffic was the least of the worry. Drivers had to contend with scores of pedestrians.
I suspect that among those shoppers were the criminal-minded, who were on the lookout for some hapless person. I got no report of larceny from the person and that may be because the thief would not have got far even if he had tried.
The shops were full, despite the talk of business being bad. Of course the comments were mixed. One local businessman said that this Christmas was better than last year. Another would merely say that it could have been better although he could not say how.
It never crossed his mind if he were selling clothing and footwear that people, especially young people, are big into on-line shopping. It would be interesting to see the figures. The barrels keep coming and from one shipping agency, the numbers were no less than in years past.
The night clubs requested a lifting of the 2:00 am curfew and got it, so I asked myself that if things were so bad, why would a night club want an extended opening hour? It would be losing money the longer it stayed open. So I concluded that all this talk about bad business was just talk, and more than a hint of greed.
Christmas is never good in Guyana without the masquerade dancers, and there were a few. In Beterverwagting, when I was a child, we fashioned our own band and danced our way to the homes in the village. The money we collected did wonders for Christmas Day.
On the Essequibo Coast, this tradition still continues. The last time I was there at Christmas I saw these young men of every race dancing in the streets while the liquor flowed. I was willing to bet that not one of them would remember the last place they went at the end of the exercise.
And while we celebrate, spare a thought for the animal lovers. Countless pigs, sheep, ducks and chicken went to the Great Beyond to make us happy. Throughout the year there were these animal lovers going around hunting for unfortunate animals. Today they took a rest and did not spare a thought for the chicken in their plate, or the ham or the duck curry or the mutton.
Christmas does that to people. It masks the unpleasant and sets us up to do the same thing all over again next year. Did I just hear a huge firecracker?

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