Be your own Santa

Dec 19, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person without access to a Christmas bonus must be in want of a cash grant. Or so the prevailing wisdom seems to suggest.

The recent disgruntled murmurs regarding the non-payment of said cash grant, has set me pondering. And I must confess, the mental landscape it revealed was more bewildering than attempting to explain football’s offside rule.

Persons tuned into to the radio and television yesterday waiting, hoping that the government would have a rethink and announce the cash grant for Christmas. It did not dawn on the desperate hopefuls that even if there was such an intention, logistically it would be impossible for such a payment to reach their pockets in time for Christmas Day.

In their quiet desperation, they had failed to consider that no bureaucratic sleigh, however well-intentioned, could have navigated the red-tape blizzard to deliver such a grant by the 25^th of December. This collective suspension of disbelief, however, would have been wholly unnecessary had they but glanced over their shoulders into the not-so-distant past.

There was a time in Guyana, I am reliably informed, when the Treasury was in a state resembling a sucked orange.  And yet Christmas arrived with its customary punctuality. Gifts were exchanged. Cakes were baked. Rum was plenty.  Jollification was all around. The whole affair was managed without the slightest whisper of a government subvention for festive merriment.

One simply made do, muddled through, and discovered that the primary ingredient for a “beautiful” Christmas was not legal tender, but a stout heart and a willingness to laugh when the liquor and food flowed.

The present disappointment, I gather, stems from a ‘semantic mirage.’ A statement was made about a ‘beautiful Christmas’. The populace heard this statement and somehow, saw etched in letters of fire, the promise of a cash grant. For some it appeared in denominations of $100,000 and for others as $200,000 – don’t ask me what was responsible for the disparity.

But it is a tragic tale, really: high hopes dashed against the rocky shore of fiscal reality. A lesson, perhaps, that one should never trust a politician to play Santa.

But here is the kicker that turns the whole affair from tragedy to farce. Cast your eyes, if you will, upon Regent Street! Since the tail-end of November, the citizenry has been shopping with the focused abandon. Money is sloshing about the economy like champagne. And when the private sector, those heartless plutocrats, start disgorging their legendary Christmas bonuses, the spending will reach a pitch.  The money, dear reader, is demonstrably there. It is simply residing in pockets other than those of the ordinary man and public servants.

And who, pray, is the architect of this Yuletide liquidity crisis?  One must view the situation with a clear, if sympathetic, eye. Traditionally, the government, in a fit of seasonal benevolence, has timed the payment of a retroactive salary increase for December. A splendid arrangement, synchronising cash inflow with festive outflow.

This year, however, in what can only be described as a political gambit, the authorities paid this retroactive lump sum in July. July!  The average public servant, confronted with this early windfall, did what any right-thinking person would do: he treated it as, well, a windfall. It has doubtless been spent on sensible thing. The consequence is that the December pay packet now arrives as naked of extra cheer.

If the celebration of Christmas is wholly contingent upon a last-minute monetary injection from the State, then the problem lies not in the Treasury’s coffers, but in one’s own domestic budget. The festive season is not a surprise attack. It is a fixed point in the calendar, as predictable as the turning of the Earth. One must, in the words of the philosophers, ‘save up for a rainy day,’ or in this case, the end of year spending spree.

In short, the entire brouhaha is a masterpiece of self-inflicted irony. To clamour for a cash grant to fund one’s gaiety is to admit a rather fundamental failure in household strategy. It suggests that one’s finances are in a state of disarray. And that one has deluded oneself into believing that the government somehow has an obligation to fatten your pockets for Christmas. The true spirit of Christmas, one feels, should be proof against such expectations. After all, a government cash grant may buy a larger microwave or a larger carpet but it cannot purchase a merrier heart. And if it can, then, something is radically wrong.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• bonus, Christmas, Peeping Tom, Santa

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