RUNUP TO END-OF-YEAR HOLIDAY SEASON

Dec 08, 2022 Consumer Concerns, Features / Columnists

PAT DIAL

Kaieteur News – As we move towards the Christmas holiday season, there are a number of things we would remind consumers.

Christmas is a time of gift-giving. Until the beginning of World War II, Guyanese people gave each other gifts of fruit and other edibles. There would be rich fruit cakes and black cakes and home-made drinks such as jamoon wine, rice wine, sorrel, ginger beer and local fruits such as custard apple, sugar apple, tropical peaches, melons, sweet fig bananas and so on, as well as imported ones such as apples, grapes, peaches, plums and cherries with dried figs, apricots and dates. Jams and jellies made with local fruit such as guava were also favourites.

With the onset of World War II, foreign imports such as wheaten flour and foreign dried fruit ceased and there were scarcities of all essentials which were imported. This caused gift-giving to be confined to homemade drinks. People preferred homemade drinks to aerated ones and in any case, Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola made their appearance after the end of the War.

By the 1950’s, normalcy had returned to Guyanese life and foreign imports again commenced, but the social pattern of Christmas gift-giving had undergone a change. People now preferred to give imported confections, modernized kitchen equipment and household durables, and children were given mechanical toys instead of the perennials like snakes and ladders, Chinese checkers and monopoly. By the end of the decade, locally produced gifts fell out of fashion.

Christmas 2022 would witness the advent of a new oil-producing Guyana which is becoming wealthier by the month and moving towards the achievement of First World standards of life. The instability of national psyche which such rapid societal movement engenders could be stabilized by reverting to many of the pre-War customs, which would act as a civilizing force to the rawness and insensitivity occasioned by sudden wealth. Christmas gift giving this year could well revert to the older custom of giving locally produced items, whether homemade or by local manufacturers, invoking a feeling of novelty and nostalgia. Such local gifts could be home made cakes and pastries, the Beharry range of confections which are world class and were largely formulated by one of the famous Swiss confectioners, the Demerara Distillers rums which are acclaimed to be the best in the world, the Banks DIH and DDL liqueurs, the biscuits and crackers Banks DIH produces, and the new range of Moscato wines which were put on the market recently. These wines are rice based like the famous Chinese Maotai and the Japanese Sake, and are in the tradition where the grain of a country is used to produce its wines, just as whiskey and vodka are wheat based. Amerindian craft is another area which could supply many Christmas gifts such as fans, table mats, nibbi furniture and hammocks. Amerindian cassareep and the Beharry range of spices would certainly give unique tastes to Christmas cooking.

The beautiful custom of exchanging Charismas Cards has been on the wane since the advent of the Internet. Some of these cards were so beautiful that they are now collectors’ items. A reversion could be made to writing Christmas letters and these would invoke much nostalgic memories.

Christmas decorations had become very spartan during the country’s economic depression and even when the economy revived, there was no reversion to the beautiful lush decorations of the past. This year could mark a revival. The realistic artificial flowers perfumed with the odours of the respective flowers could again be produced. Such flowers were roses, lilies, dahlias, orchids and a number of others. Then there were the colourful tinsel decorations which brightened both day and night and of course Christmas trees with their colourful decorations bringing joy to children, the ubiquitous fairy lights blinking the Charismas colours of red, blue, green and gold and cribs and manger scenes.

Shopping is one of the joys of the Christmas Season. The shops with their new stock of attractive goods, their decorations, the many new and novel items on display and the bright colours everywhere are designed to mesmerize and invoke a dreamland. There are a few guiding principles of which we may remind the consumer: Resist compulsive buying since one would be saddled with a number of useless purchases in the next week; buy only what is required since in a week or two after Christmas, prices would fall; always evaluate prices, quality and resist the mesmerizing milieu of mechanistic buying.