ANALYSIS: A look back at X-mas in the good old days
A vendor selling Christmas trees in Dar es Salaam. Commercialisation is now pushing many city dwellers to shop till they drop ahead of Christmas. PHOTO | FILE
If you are a child of the 70s and 80s, you can’t avoid feeling nostalgic whenever it is the Christmas season. In those days, scarcity was the norm. You did not have such aggressive marketing of commodities in the newspapers because scarcity meant that demand outstripped supply.
Having soda was a mark of status and prosperity if you took it to school for break with an apple or sausages, you were allowed to falsely brag that your parent had returned with these goodies from Nairobi! Now we have so much to buy, but not many people can afford.
Families engaged in baking cakes for the day. There were families that were known to bake cakes and buns to sell to the neighbours throughout the year. This was mainly the idea of mothers, some of whom had studied Home Economics in school and put it to good use in the times.
Baking during Christmas time was fun, for the young ones, for that is when you had the opportunity to lick sugar -a rare often rationed commodity- under the pretext of ‘helping out.’
In every trading centre, there were tailors who had a variety of clothing materials brought in from Kenya - the main beneficiary of our scarcity. It wasn’t uncommon to find a whole family dressed in clothes designed from the same material from daddy to the last born looking like a circus troupe. The other source of clothes was the mothers, who in school had mastered tailoring and moonlighted as dress makers to add to the family income. Their homes were a beehive of activities at this time of the year as they made clothes for their friends and neighbours. Those clothes were often complimented with new Bata Shoes, which served as you ‘Christmas present’ and went on to become your Sunday best.
The other main activity was decorating homes and some offices. The main item was the Christmas trees, aka Lawson’s cypress, (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana), which were cut from hedges of homes. On these, we placed Christmas cards, which were bought from bookshops in all sizes and shapes with the image of Father Christmas in a sledge riding on snow. Families and friends exchanged them and kept them for recycling during subsequent Christmas seasons. Now in the electronic age of plenty you receive a text message or WhatsApp saying something like ‘wsh u a mry xms and a hpy Nu Ya!’ The tree is now almost extinct because of the current practice of building concrete perimeter walls. Today we have plastic trees sold in the supermarket!
Standard entertainment was Christmas carols by the local church – which was very boring for children. But you also had the choirs marching at night with candles and singing Christmas songs, which was fun. Then there were the movies about the story of Jesus in cinemas. We had cinemas, which at times threw in Bruce Lee and James Bond movies.
It was quite a treat when you visited your grandparents in the village. They showered you with love and attention and you got to see plenty of cows, goats, chicken and banana, coffee plus tea plantations ‘live.’ Looking back now, life was quite basic because we had been humbled and had accepted our situation. Unlike today when commercialisation is pushing us to shop until we drop, back in the day, our expectations were low and we did not expect much. To be alive was good enough and that made Christmas very memorable and enjoyable. Merry Christmas to you!
