He knows if you’ve been good or bad, so be good for goodness sake . . . . – Excerpt from Jingle Bells
This is the Christmas season.
It is a season with its own characteristic smells.
As a young boy growing up, those smells included the fresh fragrance of khus khus grass used to make a high, buffy mattress into which my brothers and I ‘dived right in’ on Christmas night.
This was long before the divans and the king size ‘slumber rest’ and ‘sleep rite’ and ‘rest-on-it’ models were invented. So on Christmas night, the smell of fresh khus khus sent us to sleep long before Santa came down our fire hearth, since we had no chimney.
Then, I recall only too well the smell of marl from the quarry. One important childhood chore was to have the yard around the chattel house, as my grandmother would say, “fire bright”. This meant that every rock hole was raped of its weed. As the moon rose on Christmas night, the hill on which our house was perched was transformed into a storybook kingdom.
One of the smells, or should I say, odours that reminded us of Christmas was the scraping of the furniture and polishing, staining and varnishing that gave our home an entirely new smell that said to all ‘it’s Christmas!’.
Once this process was completed, the chairs and other furniture were put away until the house ‘was put away’ on Christmas night. No one dared sit in those chairs, most of which were reserved for potential guests, many of whom never arrived.
Once the assorted postcards from our family ‘over in away’ were arranged on the centre table, the congoleum from the Indian itinerant salesmen, covered the floor and the earthern kitchen floor was swept, the entire house was literally polished away for Christmas.
This smell had a freshness that filled the atmosphere and it added to our excitement and expectations of this time of year.
But the most filling smell of the Christmas of my childhood came from the imported leg ham that hung from the rafter in my shedroof from a month or two before Christmas.
Long before Farmer’s Choice or Peronne hams were invented, the tar-covered animal limb walked its way into our lives at this special time of year. This smell was perhaps the most reassuring odour to which our taste buds and salivary glands responded long before the meat became one with our stomachs.
But the biblical text at Christmas could have been that ‘man should not live by ham alone but by other delicacies of the season’. For the smell of the khus khus grass bed, polished furniture, white marl blanketing the yard, of ham hanging from the ceiling, was still not enough to complete the full aroma of the season.
For while the boys were on the outside putting on the finishing touches, granny was in the kitchen from which other smells of the season were generated. The inviting fragrance of cake, then called ‘puddin’, of coconut bread, of cassava pone, great cake, all topped off with the regal smell of sorrel which had been in ‘steeping’ for more than a fortnight, completed the menu for the feast which followed on Christmas Day.
So that when I visited Bridgetown recently, just three days before Christmas, while the sights were very reminiscent of the song: Silver Bells; It’s Christmas Time In The City, there was one offensive odour that detracted from the traditional aromas of the season.
The bespectacled Santa Claus was very present. Little children were being dragged here and there as mothers sought to get the much requested gifts for the li’l ones. Public address systems belted out news of bargains and sales all designed to lure shoppers into buying items that should really be classified as wants rather than needs.
As lines at cashier points lengthened and shoppers’ patience shortened, that offensive odour snuffed its way up my nostrils.
While it has nothing to do with the season per se, Lower Broad Street told the smelly tale of a city that smelled like an unkempt and unsanitized urinal. The almost nauseating and asphyxiating smell of ‘pee’ pervaded the air in The City. As a male, I felt very embarrassed that, in spite of our being heavily reliant on tourism, our men would stop by any wall, pole or shadow to empty their bladder often in full public view.
I become even more concerned when mothers share the guilt as they are often seen instructing both their young boys and sometimes girls to ‘pee’ in public, even if in the streets.
So as we celebrate Christmas this year, as Christians do during the Lenten season, let ‘peeing’ in public be one of the excesses that we give up. But let it not be just for Christmas but for all times so that not just our visitors but all citizens could enjoy the Yuletide season wherever we go without having to compete with the non-toxic ingredients of human ‘pee’.
So come on men, do the shaking elsewhere so that the true jingle smells of Christmas can pervade!
