What the Dickens! “Frankly Speaking” on a day other than Friday?

Well, you know the reason why by now – and my disciplined continuous record remains intact today. So season’s greetings, formally, from me to you. Hope you’re warm and dry! Christmas does marvellous things to the mind. It brings out the best in most of us – the willingness, the urge to assist the less fortunate; the need to refurbish, to renovate, to renew; the time off to consider the religious nature of the Festival of the Advent, the Birth, replete with its Bible-recorded miracles and most of all, the bonding of all the groups who join in the celebrations.

(Sure there are the rapacious lot who set out to exploit and rob, in the name of the Baby Jesus, but these notes are not about them – the wicked amongst us.)

I’m now producing and presenting a neat little programme on NCN radio which flashes back to Guyanese Christmases past. I touch on the Christmas traditions of the forties to sixties, say. Other older folks are also reminiscing at this time, I know. As we roll back the years, in these days of television, computers and cellular phones.

In my childhood, for example, after “breaking–up” the poorest house, my grandmother would teach me to varnish the chairs; (how sticky, then shiny and full of smell!); others sand-papered and used French polish on the furniture – all wood! Salted butter had to be stirred and beaten to get that salt out before mixing for the black (fruit) cake to be baked; ginger had to be pounded and sorrel set for the Christmas beverages; (No Rice Wine or Mango fly?); Carbon bombs in tins, toy pistols with caps and girls’ dolls and houses were the toys of choice.

Grandmother hoped for the Christmas box hand or Penny Bank savings, with which to buy Linolenum for the floor, “blinds” for the windows, hams, casareep, pork, beef, cow heels and fancy biscuits for the stomachs. Window – shopping down-town preceded purchases. Most boys hoped to avoid Midnight Mass.

The Masquerade/Santapee bands from Albouystown or the villages recalled the minstrel street-bands which evolved from the African slaves annual merriment; steel-band tramps when thousands followed Quo Vadis, Invaders, Kaietuckians, Silvertones and other bands for hours along the streets were a main ingredient of old-time merriment and Christmas School parties were clean fun as we left with our brown paper bags with cakes and sweets.

The sixties/seventies ushered in sweet local Christmas songs that still endure: Happy Holidays, Christmas is with us again, No Christmas for me etc. Every child regardless of race or religion knew those Christmas hymns called carols. That’s how powerful Christmas was with the mind.

A White European Christmas

I close this incomplete flashback with these thoughts: we know by now that the Baby Jesus was not actually born on December 25. (Could someone tell me the real accurate time, please?)

And just like that uncertainty, we who are over fifty, embraced in our youth, the symbols and imagery of the snowy-white, European/American Christmas. I refer to a particular Santa Claus from the North Pole, Reindeer, songs and carols with winter imagery sleighs and sleds, ivy, holly, mistletoe, chestnuts, snowmen, apples and grapes and foreign greetings cards.

I won’t dwell on the irrelevancies here. Except to say that those foreign folks messed with my mind. Successfully! Because in my later years even now, Christmas won’t be the same without them. Won’t Christmas be poorer for their disappearance? Discuss! Happy New Year too!

Jim in our Parliament!

Only last Friday I discussed and recalled Christmas in our Parliament thirteen years ago.

Well I found myself in the National Assembly this Monday. Because I want to keep this very short I’ll merely record this: I am hard put to comprehend why the Government side evoked the 30-year-old spirit of the infamous Jim Jones and his People’s Temple (Cult).

Cleverly using the Questions to Ministers period, usually utilized by the Opposition members, the government led by the veteran Gail who I featured in my last Friday’s “Christmas” Parliament “piece, asked a series of questions of their own Ministers, seeking any official answers available about the details of Jim Jones entrance and activities up at Port Kaituma.

Questions and attempted answers prompted some witty and provocative responses from the opposition benches – including their own questions about “the Buddy’s lease”, “Roger Khan connections”, “Gajraj and guns” and even “when Rohee was playing dice outside Metropole”.

I suppose the government had a plan and an objective. Oh well…the floods are still with us – and crime, fires, HIV, accidents and high prices. I sighed wearily in Parliament this past Monday.

Prognostications…..

*1) The word at the top here means “predictions”.

*2) Stabroek in Georgetown will disgrace the capital a little more, as “de people muss mek a dalluh”.

*3) The Americans will release info about big ones in corruption – and the opposition figures might be included too.

*4) The new Skeldon estate will work but sugar cane will be badly needed.

*5) FITUG will assume the TUC role fully.

*5b) The new Berbice River Bridge will give some problems but the Dutch builders won’t want to be embarrassed for long.

*6) Barack Obama will visit Guyana in April.

‘Til Next Week!

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