Frankly Put: The Death Of Our Festivities
Staring down the barrel of the New Year, 2025 now, looks like a meditative reflection on this festive season; it wasn’t great but … it wasn’t bad. I find this very contradictory to the stereotypical perspective on the season.
If asked, I can quickly offload the blame for the numbness to the scapegoat of all good things gone bad; that is adulting. To be fair it is true that the daze of the sparkling lights, that decorate the streets over this holiday period, has since faded from the eyes. There is a weird way that the colours have dulled but that is only looking at how things have changed since childhood. This time of year has become a sorry attempt to sort out any end-of-year burnout and scavenge whatever is left of one’s social and family life amidst these tough economic times.
It isn’t fair to take away the power of the capacity to do a lot of the things we actually want to do. I’ve watched quite a number of my agemates match pyjamas, travel out of the country or even within, have “Friendsmas” and take themselves back home. Life now looks like creating traditions that will carry on in our lives and possibly that of our children because we are adults. It has been a lot of “Why not?” moments that have led to the greatest memories and bonds. By virtue of that adult title, this is life now. The choices that take form in the experience of life.
This pause has brought more gratitude into my perspective of the efforts made by the adults who came before me and who were doing the very things we are right now, in their ways. Gratitude for the moments when persistence pushed me past my stubborn and naive tantrums. The awkward teen years when the horns grew and that “cooler than thou” mentality started. Trying to overcorrect the feeling of make-believe embarrassment that seems to tackle everyone at that point. Yes, some things are cringe but all the same they make the warmest memories in retrospect.
I remember Christmas like this; a big family packed into a small house like sardines. The big fights the day before, trying to martial everyone into a car and the exodus out of the big city into the rural environs we called upcountry. It was the silent anticipation to see who would arrive at grandmother’s house first so they would have boasting rights over their cousins. It was watching the cars we would overtake on the highway believing that we were the fastest ones to get to our own home. It was dosing off in the back seat out of boredom which then turned into energy to run around the whole afternoon in games.
It was extending the day into the night with a large gathering where there was eating, praying the rosary then some catch-up time. It was being selected for impromptu entertainment — I think that was a test of the child’s creative mind because we came up with performances like we had been practising all year. It was the boys being pooled into mchongoano competitions to see who had the sharpest tongue. Culminating in a cake being cut and on one particularly memorable Christmas, presents. Sleep would be well into Christmas day; arranged on mattresses in the living room.
The next morning was breakfast made by the aunties. Those who wished to go for mass, disappeared before we woke up. No alarm clocks except for the excitement of playing games with cousins. I honestly could not account for the day but we had lunch then sometimes dinner and another night before leaving the next day. Racing back to the big city, never really knowing who reached their home first but still carrying that competitive spirit. That has since changed for sure.
There is a grief that has claimed its space this time around. I think that the change was less “rug from underneath our feet” and more “ship of Theseus”. It’s only in looking back from where I am standing right now that I see how different things are. It is a thing that brings a subtle sadness like something was lost along the way. Something we did not know was important. It’s not really a “well running dry” more a “can we now use the water to irrigate our farms” thing. Trying to save the warmth of the past and spread it into the now and then to come in a way that we can lie to ourselves that there was never a gap to the way these things took form.
The awareness of how much grief there is in this growing-up thing is a whole other thing. There is a slight sadness that seems to shine through most when there is a new and seemingly better way of doing things. Maybe traditions need the space to shed their immutable title. They are not rituals. They can be changed when they are passed down. One must be very willing to release them to the next generation and allow them to morph them to suit the times with the deep understanding that they too lose something in the way things are changing.
Allow things to die as they are, bury them and make space for them to germinate into whatever new thing that may or may not take their place. It’s a death of our festivities… or not; it’s all a matter of perspective, to put it Frankly.
* Author’s Note *
Happy Holidays and a prosperous new year 2025. Thank you so much for another year of joining me in my little corner of the internet.
