In the early 1990s, my family moved to Canada. When my parents decided to move, they were in their 40s, petrified, with two kids, two suitcases and just Cdn$80 in their pockets.
When we set off, my parents forgot to tell my sister Nicky and I that we were moving permanently—a not so tiny detail that coloured that first Christmas.
We ended up at my aunt’s house, living in the basement. My mom already had a job as a registered nurse lined up and within a week my dad was employed as a labourer.
We arrived in August and it was warm but that was soon to change. By September we were freezing and living underground like hobbits. My sister, who is three years older than me, reassured me that we would be back home in Industry, East Coast Demerara before Christmas.
I must have wished a million times for Christmas to arrive. Even as my parents enrolled us in school and we tried on various snowsuits at Canadian Tire, I maintained hope. Patiently, I waited, trying to express myself to my teacher, who had trouble understanding me due to my thick accent.
It was an incredibly isolating feeling. The only thing that kept a very pensive and pessimistic me going was the thought of home, over 4,000 miles away. My sister became a little more reserved than before, probably because we were slowly freezing to death in my aunt’s basement. She had always loved Christmas but Canada was taking the Christmas spirit from her. Nicky could care less about decorating. She didn’t feel like any of it was ours to decorate; we were made to feel like the decorations themselves were a treat that we were lucky enough to help my cousins with. I was too young to help her or to cheer her up, so I would tell her not to worry because we would be going home soon.
Nicky knew better though. Maybe she always did and just lied to me to make adjusting easier or maybe she herself believed we would be going home, I don’t really know.
Christmas came. My cousins decorated their tree and we hung a few ornaments but it wasn’t our tree. That wasn’t our home and we knew it. We were reminded that it wasn’t. Christmas at home was always a huge affair. My mom would bake cakes while we chased chickens my parents had raised around the yard before they were selected to become Christmas dinner. Our neighbours were always involved; people were in and out of the Industry house from the beginning of December.
Christmas in Guyana was a family affair. Christmas in Canada was an isolating day that I wanted to be over as soon as it began. My aunt’s home wasn’t ours. My parents were fighting, bickering more than ever; my sister was becoming more introverted; we were losing aspects of our family. And it was all Canada’s fault. Or so five-year-old me thought. My parents didn’t make Christmas breakfast, or lunch or dinner. That wasn’t their kitchen, it wasn’t there space and I could tell they were both getting frustrated and sick of living under an extended family while paying a handsome rent and not enjoying the ability to call their slice of that house home.
Christmas was like every other day except my sister and I were required to feign more interest. We opened our gifts and smiled from ear to ear. My aunt and my uncle looked at us as if we needed to thank them for life. We thanked and thanked, smiled and smiled, not wanting to make our parents look like they were raising ungrateful children. My aunt and uncle told my sister to be careful not to break her new doll. She opened it that day, played with it in their presence and put it back in the box never to touch it again. She didn’t want it to break. Years later, my sister still had the doll. When I asked her why she kept it, she said she just didn’t want to get rid of it, in case my aunt ever asked about it. We looked at each other and shook our heads. Within the month, Nicky donated that doll.
I couldn’t tell you what I got because I wasn’t grateful. I was growing to despise that house, knowing that my grandmother was making sweets and my aunts would be baking macaroni and missing duck curry and spicy ginger beer back in Guyana. I knew there would be no pepperpot here. My mother’s relatives were devout Hindus but my dad’s were lapsed Christians and one of my aunts would always give my sister and I pepperpot and freshly baked bread with a laugh and a warning: “Don’t tell yuh muddah.”
My mom, of course, knew but didn’t care because that was what Christmas was supposed to be. One big extended affair, it was never about the presents it was about being together. I know that sounds incredibly fake and cheesy but that first Christmas made me determined to never have another Christmas like our first in Canada.
My parents knew too, although it is something they never acknowledged or were vocal about. As the New Year began and spring brought new life, my parents moved us to a small two-bedroom apartment that was ours, that we called home for the second Christmas in Canada.
Gratitude—that feeling that was being shoved down my sister’s throat and mine one year earlier—I felt it during that second Christmas. I was grateful that my parents scraped up enough money and bought an old Chevrolet Acadia that we packed with a small four-foot Christmas tree and Cdn$1.99 worth of decorations. It wasn’t much, but it was ours. My parents bickered, but not in a hostile way; they traded jabs at each other over who had the better ideas. My sister took her time relishing Christmas and hanging garlands on every doorway.
I was still young, but I knew this was what Christmas was supposed to be like, feel like, smell like and to date this was my most memorable. My parents barely had any money but I remember exactly what I got. I was just grateful that they listened to me for months as I dreamed about Polly Pocket, tiny-less-than-an-inch-size dolls that had there play houses fashioned out of compacts. My sister, who had turned to music to escape the living conditions during our stay with our extended family, got a Walkman and a few dance cassettes. My parents seemed sad on Christmas Eve that they couldn’t give us more but they didn’t seem to realise that they did give us more than we thought we would get.
My parents gave us a home on that second Christmas in Canada. The house was small, we didn’t have much but it was ours. And although we were missing our family, they also brought Guyana to Canada. They gave us memories that put us back in Guyana: My mother breaking out into hives trying to make pepperpot, just so the rest of us could have a bit of Guyana during our second Christmas; my parents shuffling all over the apartment taking chicken out of the oven or trying to secretly stuff our stockings; and hours spent unravelling fairy lights. My sister and I were involved in every aspect; we weren’t told to sit quietly; we weren’t made to feel like we were lucky to receive charity from an extended family. We weren’t cold, living in a dark basement scared to ask for the furnace to be turned on. We were loud like we were used to being and I even got sick from eating too much cake batter.
After a few years back in Guyana, I’m spending another Christmas in Canada. When my editor asked me for a Christmas story, I smiled, knowing that I would write about the first and second in Canada, which stand out the most in my almost 30 years. This year my mom will mark a year in remission and I can’t think of anything that I am more grateful for than her health and life. Grateful is the one word I can honestly say comes to mind when I think of Christmas, grateful my parents struggled to give us a home away from home.
