Christmas is best at home with the family

Weekend Argus writers share their holiday memories, replete with clothes, food, church, relatives and friends

HAPPILY, by the time I hit my mid teens there was no more talk of turkey in my home at Christmas. Even my father – after the passing of Mohandas Gandhi the gentlest of men on earth – developed a dangerous, steely edge on the issue, faced with yet another annual offering possessed of a texture one might imagine characteristic of auk or dodo. From then on the poultry on offer was chicken and only chicken; less to dry out.

And leg of lamb, burned beef, an anomalously good glazed ham (the exception proving the rule of appalling gastronomy) along with the usual vegetable accompaniments of roast potato, Brussels sprouts, peas, cauliflower etc. A Kimberley Christmas.

Glazed ham aside, you learnt at number 85 Central Road to sort of eat around the food as prepared by my fiercely proto-feminist mother on the single occasion she would spend longer than 10 unbroken minutes in the kitchen from year to year. And you focused, where possible, on seasonal specialities like tarts, pies, quiches and puddings, shop bought or contributed by friends and neighbours.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Christmas with the Central Road Powells was not about the cuisine. And yet… and yet, my friends and the friends of my sisters, year after year, happily forsook their own nearest and dearest to be part of it. Even I – ungrateful misfit though I was – regularly made the effort to be there at Yuletide, long after I had otherwise shaken the red dust of Kimberley from my boots, sometimes travelling 1 000km with friends and assorted other companions to get there.

At the head of the table you would find my father, benign and dithering; an ordained priest of the Anglican Church, but turned out for the occasion not in cassock and dog collar, but in a holey sleeveless vest and shorts. Dotted around the substantial table – remade from a giant Victorian teak office desk – the family, mother, two sisters, whatever combination of friends, relatives, refugees and orphans had been mustered that year. Most of them passionate about wildly different things at the same time, on his or her own mission, and my mother – smaller, fiercer, but otherwise the same – times two. In all it was like nothing so much as the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, even before the liqueurs arrived.

And, as in that gathering, there would usually be a dormouse or two. Somebody falling silent, growing blurry, holding on tight… Sometimes somebody drooling and dribbling or exhibiting advanced symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome, because… well, because their machinery wasn’t working very well. I remember one occasion when one of my friends, overdoing it, fell to the floor like a mighty tree in the forest.

Barely pausing for a semicolon, somebody propped him up, back against the wall, and carried on talking.

And the Reverend smiled vaguely on from his seat at the head of the table and sipped from a tiny glass of the green Chartreuse that had come to serve as a sacramental substance at Christmastime, nobody could quite remember how or when.

If you had asked me at the time, why we all routinely went to the trouble and expense of Christmas in the hellhole that is Kimberley, I probably would have said I was doing it for my parents; I might have mumbled something about affirming the bonds of tradition and belonging. I would most likely have appealed, by middle-class reflex, to the sustaining rituals of the well-tempered nuclear family.

What I came to realise decades and decades later, is what made Christmas in Kimberley special was virtually the opposite: that nothing was expected or defined, nothing worked quite the way it was supposed to; everything was accommodated. It was the very deconstruction of it all that affirmed; it was in the eccentricity that the human was to be found, celebrated… and forgiven.

A sip of Chartreuse – lingering and haunting – to that!

CLOTHING is prominent in our memories of the festive season, the Big Days, as we say in Cape Town. Generally, we are more relaxed these days in terms of the wearing of ties, suits and leather shoes, the formal wear that regulated the norm of what was our Sunday best.

The response, a few years ago, to a Christmas clothing story of mine posted on Facebook points to the possibilities of nation building through the collective recall of common experiences of Christmases past. Of course clothes bought at Christmas were meant to have utility long after the gammon and potato salad had become nothing but the taste of nostalgia.

Glenn Robertson, musician and pastor at Kaleidoscope Cafe, testified to the longevity of crimplene jackets: “My brother Brian, Keith and I had powder-blue jackets. And because I was the youngest, I got the hand-me-downs till the little crimplene fluff balls appeared on the edges.”

Marie-Louise Samuels, a Pretoria-based early childhood education practitioner, reminded me that shoes, the inimitable Bata Toughees, were

ILOVE celebrating Christmas. Ever since I was a child, there has always been something magical and mystical about it – filled with the spiritual and not-so-spiritual. First the not-so-spiritual. Christmas Day was associated with new clothes.

No amount of preaching by our Sunday school teacher could convince us the day had another significance. Not even the nativity play we performed on the day.

Even my brothers, who had to be coaxed to attend church service on Sundays, needed no extra encouragement.

It was a day for showing off new clothes, our swag – and, boy, did we maximise the opportunity!

My mother exercised her matriarchal power and decided what everyone would wear – and year after year my sister and I ended up with matching clothes.

I have no idea why she started this tradition but it continued until we were old enough to complain.

And she passed it on to me – until my 4 and 3-year-old sons exercised their democratic right to make their own choices.

Each house in the village was decked inside and out in vibrant colours. It was time for each household’s creativity to be put on show.

Our house was decorated with ribbons, tinsel, baubles, paper-chains, some hanging from the ceiling.

We had a chimney for the fireplace and the coal stove, but on Christmas Eve stockings hung on the stove as well – Santa Claus would not be given an excuse to miss a single one.

Some of these stockings belonged to our friends. And, year after year, Santa was too busy blessing other children around the world and never got a chance to make a turn by our house. After all, he couldn’t find our village, Peelton, on his map.

I am not an early bird – and this means I never tested the folklore which, when I related bought at Wayniks with the January school term in mind.

One Christmas, Clinton Hunter Brönn, a Robertson boorling, had some sartorial respite. “My parents bought us also Batas but in the woppas style. It was pumpkin coloured but was top of the range then. The Pringle of kiddie shoes.”

Ruben Botha, a Ravensmead homeboy, remembered the tailors in Tiervlei. Mr Jacobs in Kentucky Street had made him an avocado-green suit. “I matched it with a pair of ox-blood red shoes. Those shoes could have been linked to the Van Riebeeck era.”

In 1969, I was 12 years old, and wore my first tailormade suit. The tailor was Mr Hendricks on Piet Retief Street in Tiervlei (now Ravensmead). My brothers, Mark and John, and I went back for repeated alterations.

To allow for future growth, Mr Hendricks tacked a threeinch hem into all our trousers. My mother brought the suits home late on Christmas Eve. My trouser length bunched up on my shoes and so my niftywith-a-needle mother added a turn-up.

On Christmas morning, the Weeder boys stepped out on Fortieth Street. At the far end, about 20 minutes’ walk away, stood our church, St Andrews, in Eureka Estate. Our landlady, it to my sons when they were young, caused my children to look at me as though I’d lived in a dinosaur age.

This legend had it that Christmas Day was also a day when a rare sighting of the sun was supposed to take place. And to witness the vibrant glow accompanied by a magical dance, you had to rise very early.

I will set my alarm again this year.

Although my father played Christmas carols on his piano for weeks before Christmas Day, to set the tone and remind us of the significance of the day, we knew that it was really Christmas Day when we woke up to Christmas wishes from neighbours and relatives.

Everyone was in a merry mood. Some of these folks we would see once a year, in December, when they were visiting their own families because they worked on the mines, at factories and as domestic workers in the bigger towns and cities. There was always extra traffic in our house.

Sometimes our aunts and cousins from Johannesburg visited. And we would have large elaborate lunches. No turkey or gammon – but there was always a leg of roast lamb, grain-fed chicken, and my mother’s favourite Christmas pudding.

This was the only time my father would be seen at a bottle-store, because he had to get the brandy or sherry, an ingredient.

The rest of the bottle was given to some locals, who came back year after year for it.

We would go from house to house singing carols in return for treats and to show off the clothes. And each house was filled with laughter.

Christmas Day was always a day that brought everyone onto an equal footing.

The economic divisions that characterised families disappeared.

Everyone – from those who had much, to those with very little – ate and drank the best they could afford.

Merry Christmas! Spread the love. Aunty Emmy Singh, had visited us where we lived in one of the four rooms she rented out. We belonged to the same church and sometimes she would give us a ride there in her black Mercedes-Benz. Mrs Singh was tall, husky-voiced, straight-talking and elegant in the many beautiful saris she wore. I feared and adored her.

As soon as she left and we heard her back door click closed on the other side of the yard, we tore the wrapping from the gift she had given each of us. It was a red, hard-covered Ancient & Modern hymnal.

As we crossed over Balvenie Avenue, a few metres from where we lived, Mark and I considered at what point along the road we could lose our gifts. Fear of our mother’s post-mass interrogation deterred such reckless action.

We walked in the rising heat of the day, resplendent in our matching indigo-blue serge-cloth, double-breasted suits. Brylcreem-scented sweat tricked down the back of my neck. Our trousers had a 45 inch bell-bottom flare. My 1 inch turn-up stiffened into a circular wobble with each step.

Our faces masked sê-net-iets, but all the while we dreaded the response which finally came in the vicinity of the Wakefields’ home: “Au amigos, wa’sie sombreros?!”

The writer says new suits at Christmas were a mixed blessing.