By Tony Deyal
Christmas Day is a widely observed holiday on which neither the past nor the future is of as much interest as the present. It is that time of the year when you exchange hellos with strangers and, except in Guyana, good “buys” with friends and family. There is only one down-side and that is the increasing concern about the lack of religion at Christmas.
A recent survey showed that the only time most people mention God is when they check the price tags in the stores. My father and I both summoned the name of the Almighty several times each Christmas but my mother, despite her very limited budget earned by sewing, and with some minor inputs from my father and me, ensured that in “putting away” her house for the holiday, she had the latest.
There was always one item in her house that the neighbours did not have. It was not a matter of keeping up with the Joneses since they were not living close enough to have any effect on my mother’s choices. It was her love of novelty and her pride in being the taste leader in her family that took us into midnight every Christmas Eve.
One year she sold the Morris Chairs for a chrome living room suite and she was happy when she was complimented on how sweet the suite looked. The next year, the teak table was replaced by a chrome dining set. Even though the screws stared to drop out, and the bottom of the chairs came loose, it was a case of chrome sweet chrome. Then, in my first year of gainful employment at $180 a month, we bought a “gram”, not a small quantity of powdery substance that would help us make it through the nights before Christmas, but a combination of radio and gramophone called a radiogram. For something we called a “gram” it weighed tons.
But neither the cost nor the weight could dim the excitement when the truck from the village department store came to our house, horn blowing imperiously, on Christmas Eve to drop off the “thing” as my mother called it. Neighbours peeped surreptitiously from behind the curtains they were “putting up” and the children ran out asking “All youh buy a gram?” and then shouting rhythmically, “Dey buy a gram, dey buy a gram!” There were some people who packed up the radio and went for higher with the “hire purchase”, they had no money left to buy records.
Our “gram” was a Blaupunkt, made in Germany. Coming so soon after World War Two, I figured out eventually that it was the way the Germans chose to get back at us for helping the British win the war. The gram had arrived when my Mom was at her busiest best. There was the oilcloth for the kitchen table and the plastic kitchen curtains full of foreign fruits, the stretchy, springy metal curtain “rods” with the little hooks at the end holding on to bent nails on both sides of the window frame, the linoleum of as many colours as Joseph’s coat, and the smell of freshly made roti and fruit cake supersaturated for months in Cherry Brandy.
The little wooden Christmas tree with its artificial snow on green silver paper, dull bulbs and glass trinkets, was then liberally sprayed with canned “snow” and covered with “Angel Hair” which scratched more than the Kitchener record on the gram endlessly repeating, “Mooma, Mooma…”
But in the grand scheme of things, the tree and trinkets, even the gram, were mere props. The real star was the window dressing. In our house and in the entire neigbourhood, on Christmas Eve, the living room curtains were the be-all, end-all and the unresisted piece de resistance.
The living room and dining room furniture of shining chrome and plastic backs proved the point that a chair was still a chair even when there was no one sitting there. But a house was not a home without curtains. Even when Christmas was just around the corner it did not turn the final bend until the curtains were up and our mothers stepped back to admire their handiwork.
My mother’s final “sew-journ” every year was sewing the curtains for the house and hanging them up in the two bedrooms and, most important of all, the living room. From the inside looking out, pounding nails and my fingers, running to get her the scissors, sometimes bringing the iron to smooth out wrinkles, seeing her moving rapidly between the Singer sewing machine and the window, climbing the rickety wooden chair with her short self, it was impossible in the throes of back and forth to appreciate the drama.
The neighbours, unconscious of their parts, played them to perfection, peeping and peering through their curtains or sending the girls “up the road” to see who had the best curtains on the street. When the next door neighbours saw yours and pulled their curtains angrily down, you knew you had triumphed. “Look at them, dey jealous,” my mother would say with pride and her smile of satisfaction was her Christmas gift to herself.
My mother left us a few years ago but we still think of her when we get the children out of bed to open one gift from the pile under the live Christmas tree. The rest we deal with on Christmas Day as part of our late breakfast ritual. Our home continues to be a place in which Santa still lives and reigns supreme at Christmas time. I have never been one for political correctness and have no wish to be a rebel without a Claus.
Although Christmas has become so commercial and crowded that it can make anyone claustrophobic, it continues to be special for us. It is easy to be as cynical as Dick Gregory, the Afro-American comedian, who said, “I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white man would be coming into my neighborhood after dark.” Or Groucho Marx who had a different take on it. He commented wryly, “I played Santa Claus many times, and if you don’t believe it, check out the divorce settlements awarded my wives.”
Some cynics contend that while “Peace on Earth” and “Goodwill to all Men” are still around, they are overwhelmed, outnumbered and have surrendered their previous popularity to the disclaimer, “Batteries Not Included”. Yet, despite the cynicism, next Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, you will see me smiling as I remember so many Christmas days and nights when we made do with what little we had and still found enough for family and friends to eat, drink and have a good time.
As Charles Dickens wrote in The Pickwick Papers, “Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that with the recession even Santa Claus got fired. They just gave him the sack.
