Ole time Chris'mus breeze

Lance Neita, Contributor

The Christmas breeze came early this year. We felt it just last week, and thrilled to the childhood memories it invoked.

The Christmas breeze is a cool, refreshing gust of wind that comes up suddenly out of nowhere, races across the school yard, frolics with the leaves, and is gone as quickly as it comes.

It was the first sign of Christmas, and as children we used to run behind the breeze and shout "Chris'mus breeze" and laugh as the temperature fell and the excitement around toys, fire rockets, balloons, fee-fees, starlight, and visits from country cousins began.

My Christmas usually started around this time when my mother would take out her cake-baking ingredients and pans, and the fruits soaked in rum which she had hidden away since October.

We children would gather around the kitchen table as she marshalled her yabba bowl, wooden spoon, eggs, and the butter, sugar and flour bought from the Chiney shop in the square.

Special

The morning would be spent taking turns to mix, with the little fingers busily licking the bowl. The cakes, still in tins, would be stored in the cabinet safe, perched on kerosene-soaked stands to prevent ants.

Distribution day was just before Christmas. The one without rum for Aunt Ivy, the plain one for Teacher who couldn't eat fruitcake, some for the neighbours, one for Old George, and a special for the eldest son who was living in town.

Just about that time my father would lead us over to the scrub land across the road to cut a young wild-cherry tree, and we would carry it back triumphantly to the tiny veranda where it would be lined with cotton (to give the snow effect), and ringed with some pretty balls and stars hidden away from last year. Then, just before Christmas, yards and yards of coloured paper would be strung criss-cross under the ceilings, with a paper bell hanging down from the centre.

In my youth, we woke up early for five o'clock service at the parish church some eight miles away. My parents used to ride, first on their horse, later on bicycles, and as we grew older in a friend's car that would pick us up just in time for the second carol.

On return home it was time for the toys, usually a toy gun, one time a train set, dolls for the girls, a pack of balloons and, of course, a fee-fee to make a gladsome noise. I remember once a viewfinder, a little metal box that you could peer into and see a series of colour pictures on a card. You turned the card with a lever and moved transfixed from picture to picture.

Christmas dinner

Dinner was special, as we always had visitors, chicken and home-cured ham. In those early days chicken was a rare special on the Jamaican plate. No Kentucky Fried or supermarket ready-plucked chickens existed.

Fowls roosted in trees behind the house and were reared mainly for eggs. Only at Christmas, or when we had visitors would a chicken be slaughtered on Saturday evening, soaked in boiling water to remove the feathers, singed over a coal fire, and then cleaned and seasoned for Sunday cooking. How one chicken could feed 10 persons for dinner in those days was a wonder. Today it can barely manage four.

In the afternoon, we met on the village common, or in the village big yard. Everybody tidied and went for a walk, ending up on the cricket field where the boys would have fire-rocket wars, starlight and sh-booms, and the girls would show off their dolls or exchange Christmas hair decorations or ribbons. Everyone wore their 'lamas' - a new skirt, new shoes, new socks, new shirt.

After the sports, it was time for home-made ice cream, hand turned in a bucket while coarse salt and newspaper packed the ice and kept the cream frozen.

And, at the end of the day, six children were sent off to bed to dream and to face the prospect of a castor-oil washout at the end of the holidays.

And to wonder just where did that Christmas breeze go.

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