Many full moons ago, traditional classics like “Jingle Bells” dominated the radio and school Christmas parties, and we rocked around the trees and danced in the halls, dreaming of joy to the world.
The perennial holiday favourites by Americans, Brenda Lee and Bobby Helms, accompanied sedate pieces like “Feliz Navidad” by the blind Puerto Rican crooner, Jose Feliciano, played under the watchful gaze of our smiling teachers and the occasional indulgent parents, who showed all signs of stopping, scowling and staying, minus the corn or rare microwave for popping.
We cavorted in casual clothes with our pigtails and ponytails, and barely a shapely thigh or arm exposed, stuffing ourselves with peanuts, pine-tarts and patties, oblivious to the absence of any foreign chestnuts roasting, since all open fires were banned outside of the laboratories, canteen, and kitchen.
Still, we settled for watching plump pigeons rather than partridges on the neighbouring avocado or pear tree. Organisers believed in a strict God resting all merry gentlemen, much less vulnerable teenagers, so the only threat that nipped at our nose and lips, constituting a truly white Christmas, was the thick, frothy eggnog, fragrant with grated nutmeg and cinnamon. It was the most spirited of our permitted drinks in the so-called decade of excess, that ended promptly at three p.m. when the Convent bells echoed and Hark! the Herald Angels rang all along Church Street.
Recently, I was startled to read a memo from the Education Ministry, requiring city students to be dressed in uniform for a Christmas luncheon, replacing the annual get-together that proved too much of a hedonistic party. “Christmas parties in many schools have moved away from the spirit of the season to one of inappropriate behaviour and activities by students,” the memo said. “Concerns were shared about the kind of music played, clothing worn by our students despite dress codes and also the large number of uninvited persons who attend these parties. Other guidelines included early dismissal, no loitering, and bag checks for alcohol, weapons and illegal drugs.
Knowing we would never run into folks dressed up like Eskimos, even in the heart of High Street or the rest of Georgetown, our greatest infractions were screaming songs such as “Winter Wonderland.” The bleakest composition would probably have been Feliciano’s “The Cherry-Tree Carol,” an at least-five-centuries old ballad to do with the Feast of Corpus Christi. An apocryphal story of the Virgin Mary, heavy with child, travelling to Bethlehem with her husband Joseph, it relates to her request for fresh cherries from an orchard. Apparently, an early disbeliever of immaculate conception which we debated with the detachment of biologists, Joseph angrily retorted the child’s father should do the picking, causing the infant to command, from the womb, that the tree lower the fruit “so my mother could have some.”
Our “tree” was usually an untidy conical branch, cut from the line of tall, gangly pines that lined the fence outside the primary school in Charlestown. When we moved to the secondary level, geography eventually gave way to convenience and economics, and we graduated to a small, second-hand fake “fir” specimen contributed by Canada and a well-heeled classmate. One year, the class project of a wire-framed contraption with colourful streamers and handmade ornaments recycled from gathered and waste materials, took pride of place, the “fairy lights” flashing in the corner, the twinkling reflected in the few, bent foil balls and covered match-boxes.
At home, we would pull out an ancient, original cardboard box, brown and stained with age, in which we stored a vintage Evergleam aluminum Christmas tree, crafted during the 1950s and 60s, in the United States of America. Said to be the first artificial, commercially successful trees that were not green, our model came with about 100 individual branches, and had been purchased by my family, when the country was the colony British Guiana, before I was born.
Each sprig of shimmering foil needles nestled in a crinkling brown paper sleeve was taken out and arranged on a centre rod marked with ascending holes. The triangular “tree” lit by a rotating colour column, shone, as we draped it in rows of tiny bulbs and topped it with the compulsory star, the magical hues dancing across the ceilings and curtains. Sears raved, “this exquisite tree is sure to be the talk of your neighborhood. High luster aluminum gives a dazzling brilliance. Shimmering silvery branches are swirled and tapered to a handsome realistic fullness…Fireproof…”
We did not know that the aluminum “tree” had become a symbol of the commercialisation of the season following a television special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which discredited its suitability as an American holiday decoration. So, heeding Sears, we continued to unfashionably enjoy ours, well into the 1990s. By the mid-2000s, the “trees” found a new niche market online, and now sell for high prices overseas, but ours, passed on to another family, has long been discarded in favour of the Chinese soft “fir” version.
Lord Kitchener’s voice rang at home, as he urged us to “Drink a rum and a punch a crema,” the former, a fine Guyanese blend, which our father would give us a few drops of, in the mistaken belief that it “killed the worms,” while I puzzled over the latter drink for years. We sputtered and protested as the rum burnt our innards. Yet, I can smile recalling how my brother teased our mother each Christmas morning, religiously repeating at the top of his voice, “Mooma, Mooma would you like to join your sonny, I am over here, happy in the mother country. Darling, for the Christmas, your son would be really jumping, Listen to the chorus of what we all will be singing…”
They are both gone, one to a deadly heart attack at just 40, the other mercifully before, from breast cancer, leaving me and my younger sister to carry on the customs as best as we can, away from the mother country. My Trinidadian husband would finally introduce me to the elusive “punch a creme” whipping up a smooth batch from Carnation milk, eggs and Angostura bitters, but the veritable “egg nog” had such a kick that I ended up with a day-long headache and advised him I would stick to my homemade black sorrel and gingerbeer.
For him, the tree is the real root, branch and heart of our Christmas. Prone to allergies, I encouraged him to abandon the pricey fresh-cut American imports that ended up as kindle in the Barbadian backyard fires. Wherever we have resided since, we have adopted a live Norfolk pine tree. Years ago, when we lived on a Trinidadian hill near the southern seaside, we bought a new tree every year and then planted it outside to bind the soil, as it brought the family together in the preceding Christmas. In Belize, he contemplated digging up a pine tree from along the fertile highway, but our amused and concerned farming friends quickly presented us with a giant, which I handed back, several feet higher, years later, before we left Central America.
Out in the yard, we have re-planted our current specimen into a bigger pot, in preparation for its annual journey inside. It sways in the northeast Tradewinds that sweep through the surroundings, sheltered by the sprawling centuries-old giant samaan, listening to beautiful birdsong and a lifetime of lovely memories whispered in the lingering breeze.
ID is a Guyanese gardener with a back-up West Indian bay leaf, a thriving juniper, a scarlet poinsettia and a thuja cypress, but no cherry tree. She wishes all a green Christmas and a prosperous new year.
