Sounds pull me away from my sleep. I roll my eyes open and lay still. A bird is walking on the aluminum roof of my apartment. I imagine it just woke from its nest and is stretching its limbs in tentative tip-taps. The cool air wafting in is new, crisp and has a piercing smell like freshly cut, wet grass. Harmattan in December. Would it bring a Merry Christmas this year? I wonder as I time travel into the past of my childhood. I began to take notice of Christmas, its significance and festivities around the age of seven due to the unusual happenings in my family. One, my brother, the only son and last child, was born on a Christmas morning.
“Thank you, my brother. See how God favoured us. First, I had Maria during Easter. Now, I have my own Jesus at Christmas.” My father smiled broadly, the skin behind his eyes wrinkling like someone’s Christmas gift wrapper would on Boxing Day.
Daddy Chibuike, our neighbour, came to congratulate us as soon as he heard the news. Ironically, as my mother later told us, it was another kind neighbour who had been visiting my mum daily at the hospital that brought the news home to my dad. There were no mobile phones then. My mother said my father previously came to order her to come home as she had spent two days in the hospital but labour wasn’t coming; she was wasting his money- eating hospital food and taking an expensive bed. Apparently, the delivery room is a shopping mall where if you don’t get what you want, you go back home to check in later. Or perhaps, it was a vacation for a pregnant woman past her delivery date. So, he left here there to the worry of a neighbour’s husband who took the burden of checking daily on her on his way home from work. God bless him, Mr Isibor.
Christmas became an extra-do affair because people visited for one celebration or the other. Preparations in my house usually started about two weeks before Christmas. My mother would go to Eko Market on the island to buy Christmas wears and shoes for us- four children. This one pair of shoes for each one of us was the only one we would use all year long until another Christmas. If we got lucky and the shoes were still alive by then, we had two pairs of outing shoes. A rare occurrence. My mum also bought plastic, funny shaped sunglasses, colourful wristwatches and earrings. We gushed over them as she allowed us to try on everything before packing them away safely. The most fascinating of all was the sparkler, which we called Ina Olorun or Tana Tana. My mother gave us a stick each on Christmas eve while she fried and cooked at night. We raced up and down, avoiding the sparks from falling on our skins and clothes before they quickly fizzled out, leaving behind a burnt metallic smell. That’s when I tasted and felt Christmas in my bones as I munched on tiny cubes of well seasoned fried beef or pieces of chicken that had ripped off with all the stirring and poking. I went to bed imagining the awe in other children’s eyes as my siblings and I marched to the neighbourhood church in the finest, most colourful ensemble with playful lights flashing from our sunglasses and wristwatches.
We were always roused in the morning by the loud festive songs blaring from my father’s stereo. My mother’s eyes, red and bright from cooking all night on the kerosene stove with little to no sleep. My father would send me to the Mallam’s shop to buy two big loaves of sliced bread, eggs, Lipton and Peak milk tins. He would be very amiable; a miracle, if we counted how many times he was this lively as he boiled water, made the tea with the yellow label hanging by the side of the huge bowl and fried the eggs. My mother’s rest time was when she ate before she hurriedly moved us to the bathroom, laid out our dresses with instructions on what to put on now and what should wait till we stepped into church. She would send us on our way, clean the house, wash the dishes, take her bath and come join us at the service. Meanwhile, on our way to church, children ran wild, towards or away from explosive knockouts. Some naughty children threw them in our direction. Me and my siblings would drop one another’s hands and scatter like sheep at the wolf’s attack, the excited knockout jumping after us in loud bangs after bangs. We comported ourselves before entering church and everyone always turned to admire our outfits. After about three hours of much singing, family thanksgiving and dance, and listening to the repetitive story of how Jesus was born, how he would come the second time, and ‘turn to three persons beside you and say: Merry Christmas!’, we bounced back to our house with its promising smell of warm spices.
My mother entered a fresh round of cooking. The previous night, she parboiled peppers and tomatoes, boiled and fried meat and cooked delicious soups- egusi and fried pepper stew. Today, she cooked jollof rice and pounded yam in a wooden mortar, panting heavily. Her assaulted senses would not permit her to eat and she would fill her stomach by filling ours and sending food in batches to neighbours inside our rented building and those in other houses, in ceramic flat plates, we, the owners, also used once a year. They too bombarded us with all types of rice- white rice and stew, yellow rice: the poor imitation of jollof rice and some, jollof rice but never as rich and as sweet smelling as ours. Strangers wandered in with food trays and elaborate descriptions of where the senders lived, most of whom we had nothing to do with all year. My mother accepted and turned the food into bowls, to be thrashed later. Some of our greedy visitors who came later in the evening asked for the food when our tasty jollof and iyan (pounded yam) was finished. My mother always remembered to check my brother’s pockets to find money which she confiscated. There was a year we visited Eko Lagos Children’s Christmas Funfare. This funfare was advertised daily on their TV and radio programs as early as October and televised live as children had fun with lively Christmas carols as soundtrack. It was a must-go for all kids then. The father Christmas was black, in a humid grotto with assistants chaperoning the rambunctious kids for a photo. My younger siblings screamed to get away. I stood rigidly and was in haste to get away too. He was different from the Santa in Jingle Bells. I had gathered lids of Maltina drinks and went to their stand to redeem my gift. It was an oversized face cap which my mother’s younger brother took away as souvenir when he came to visit us few weeks before school resumption.
Another time, Guaranty Trust Bank had just started a kids’ saving program and invited kids to come in and get gifts. The staff who attended to us was all smiles as she handed us little white packs containing the usual- a regular exercise book, eraser, HB pencil, sharpener and wax crayons. We had these things at home but it was a gift nonetheless. As we walked through our street, children stopped and stared, wondering where a kids’ party happened and they weren’t invited or alerted by loud music.
The celebrations after Christmas slowly ebbed until they picked up again on New Year Day (January 1st) and faded into preparation for school resumption. In my early teenage years, I tumbled into another world. The approach of the year’s end brought a lot of anxieties; no increment in salary, late payments, recession and layoffs took the colour out of Christmas. My father began to pick quarrels as early as possible and Christmas became like every other day with the characteristic jollof rice but no outings or visitors. No store or streets were decorated with Christmas lights and accessories. My mother still tried to buy twelve yards of lace or Guinea fabric for my siblings and I to sew. No TV or radio programs played carols nonstop as before, not even few days to Christmas. People who bought Christmas trees as a family tradition were shaken out of the culture by stores’ outrageous prices. They realized belatedly that it was just a plastic tree and they could improvise their own Christmas tree. Knockouts were banned by customs, it was expensive anyway.
18 years later, December 2022, Open Happiness visited my neighbourhood in a mini truck filled to the top. Instead of dropping off the drinks at individual houses, the driver and the motorboys parked in the center of the street and watched people fight themselves to climb in and get a pack. Few women and children going to fetch water used their basins to cart home packs after packs. I was unaware of this happening few houses away from mine, like many others who were indoors, until my sister rushed in with two bottles of Cocacola. It had a diluted taste- sugar, cola colouring and water, exactly what Christmas has become for this generation. I look back at my past happy experiences and wonder if kids, irrespective of class, still have a reason to look forward to Christmas. I’ve grown the habit of sadly reliving old times and pumping up snatches of anticipation for the year’s end by playing the throwback afro pop refix version of my father’s favourite ‘Odun Lo Sopin’ made by Sean Tizzle titled ‘Eruku Saye Po’.
Written by Maria Candida Oluwabukola