An ode to… Christmas Eve

This evening all of us Guyanese – whether we are Christian or not – gotta celebrate Christmas Eve!! And with the rains arriving on cue, it ain’t gonna dampen our spirits… with the term used most expansively!! Not for us the 200-year-old poem that set the tone for the rest of the world during that time for the observance of the occasion – “A visit from St Nicolas”!! Has anyone nowadays even heard of the poem?? It begins… “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house/Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;/The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,/In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there”!! It’s been sung in enough movies to recognise it, innit??
But you remember that stockings gotta be hung for presents on Christmas Eve, don’t you?? Well, it was this poem – written back in 1823 when slavery was still well ensconced – that so many of what we take to be “Christmas traditions” were codified in!! Like our image of Santa Claus: “He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,/…His eyes – how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!/His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!/His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow/And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;/He had a broad face and a little round belly,/That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly./He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf”!! See??
But while we might’ve been regaled with the Santa story in school, we never thought he’d be visiting our homes, did we?? Maybe because we didn’t have chimneys for him to slide down?? So as with so many other occasions, our celebration of Christmas Eve is focused on having a good time!! Understandable for a people “whose backs were bent, but not with years” – just continuous toil for the Brits who’d allow us this night and the following day off for making merry!! They supplied the rum – which our toil produced – and we launched our tradition to accompany the rum with prodigious pots of “cook up” during which every scrap of “provisions” we had was thrown in!!
In the villages, that tradition of cook-up and rum had continued on the street corners – but now seem to’ve disappeared. We’ve replaced it with “Christmas Eve parties forcing your Eyewitness to follow Paul Simon’s advice on “50 ways to leave your (inebriated) sport”: Slip out the back, Jack; don’t be coy, Roy; hop on the bus, Gus!!
Yep!! Traditions gonna always evolve so tonight, with every (inebriated) Guyanese now owning a car, let’s start calling cabs to get home!!

…election subtlety
The Commonwealth Group that observed this year’s General and Regional Elections has released its report. And as one of its major recommendations, propose that we reintroduce presidential debates!!  While they concede that, happily, the campaign wasn’t totally focused on race – clearly Black Pudding Man’s diatribes were dismissed! – they claimed with straight faces that debates would foster and promote issue-based campaigns!!
Now, why your Eyewitness feels the Commonwealth Observers gotta be jerking our chain, is that they saw that during the campaign, Sanction Man was incapable of stringing together more than a single sentence when asked even the most innocuous of questions!! And that one sentence was “I will get back to you shortly”!!! To have him debating, say, Irfaan Ali, would be like asking him to race against Lando Norris – the Formula 1 champion – in the Monte Carlo Grand Prix!! He’s got a car (Lamborghini) like he’s got a mouth – but he’s just not in the same league!!
He should listen to the (diplomatic) Commonwealth Observers!!

…jumping the gun
US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video claiming the US Coast Guard “apprehended” an oil tanker off Venezuela. But President Trump was forced to clarify that “We’re actually pursuing” the tanker!!
She made the US look weak.