My childhood Christmases were times of once-a-year things.
Take ham – and I, like many other children, not infrequently took unsanctioned slices, having made surreptitious visits to the larder or wherever the salty treat (oxymoron?) was kept. The leg ham, the target of hanging, soaking, boiling, baking, cloving, even bathing with rum or beer, and glazing with honey, was the king of Christmas. A once-a-year thing.
Other only-at-Christmas goodies: sorrel; red English apples; “great cake”; jug-jug; falernum.
There was too, once-a-year hard work (any work is hard work to a child): putting down marl; clearing grass with hoe and sickle, which itself was not a once-a-year thing, but because it was Christmas the grass had to be cut lower and the finished job had to be tidier – this was inspected work.
And I cahn forget shelling peas (which would become part of another once-a-year treat: green peas and rice) till some kind of black, mucky residue clung to your fingers; cleaning glass windows (including the replacement for the one that I in my nine-year-old naivete thought a marble fired from a gutterperk would simply rebound from).
These things also were Christmas specials: a flood of people coming to our home to collect their Christmas dresses from my seamstress mother; going for my mother’s blind friend Miss Blackman and engaging in the step-a-minute (I exaggerate) yearly ritual as we made the 200-metre trek from her home to ours, where she would enjoy fellowship and soft food and regale us.
And, of course, the music. There was, and still is, something special about the sound of carols. There is an enchantingness about the strains, and enticingness that seems to shout, “Sing me!” Those songs of Christmas are so resonant in feeling and in experience.
Human reach
Few songs, as a group, embody as carols do, that human reach for the beyond-us and lay hold of the riches deriving from the soul marriage of lyric and melody. They may well be the consummate song type.
Now, when we were children, we thought as children. And the length and breadth of our thinking about Christmas was about receiving. Even the hard work had at its end a reward that was like no other – a Christmas reward: rest that had an other-worldly quality; the once-a-year pleasure of certain goodies; the pride of a house specially spruced up; the child-eyes’ dazzling of pretty lights, pretty paper; the overall ineffable charm of the season, transmitted through its sights, smells, tastes, and sounds.
No longer children, we have a chance to grasp and live out more profound aspects of Christmas, no longer seeing Christmas as a time of getting and not letting graver qualities of the commemoration be lost on us – not settling for merely symbolic gestures in their direction.
As has happened with Crop Over. It may be dubbed “more than a carnival”, but the “more than” does not add up to a secure steeping in its oft heralded origins. It is, to all intents and purposes, a carnival – and I suspect that even if/when there is not a blade of cane (crop) to be found in Barbados, when it is really over, we will continue to festivalize ourselves in the same way – without missing a beat.
From a religious perspective, which we still cling to, the essence of Christmas is the coming of a gift in the form of Jesus Christ – a gift of redemption, a gift of forgiveness of sin, an undeserved
gift for our betterment. Not a once-a-year-thing. Not like Santa Claus.
That would seem to mean, if we buy into it, that a working out of that central aspect of giving in its deeper meaning would be a critical aspect of our lives.
With all the celebration, all the church-going, all the allusions to Christ in our Christmas culture, why should anyone think that we have not committed to Christian theology’s interpretation of Christmas?
So, where is our giving that is not a kind of transaction between family, friends and colleagues or a haphazard yuh-ketch-muh, conscience-salving Salvation Army offering?
Arguably, the heart of Christmas is calling us to charity as genuine, concerned giving and beyond that to charitableness of spirit (temperate treatment of others – what some translations of the Bible call love, making the distinction clear in a verse such as 1 Corinthians 13:3, “And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing” – New American Standard Bible).
We say that one Christmas over 2000 years ago we received the gift of love. What are we really giving that is not a once-a-year thing?
? Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email [email protected].
