Christmas is probably one of the most exciting times for a kid. In South Africa we were doubly blessed by it coming in the middle of the long summer holidays. Just when you were getting bored of doing nothing, there came Christmas, slap bang in the middle. It couldn’t have been planned better.
There was the carefully maintained fiction of Santa. Even my older siblings scrupulously avoided giving away the secret. Slowly but surely you would begin to question it and eventually reluctantly accept that you had been conned, although it was not malicious. Even after I realised that it was not true, it took a while to totally internalise it – very similar to the shaking off of your young religious indoctrination. That never damped our enthusiasm. Presents are always welcome after all. We carried on all the traditions because they were, after all, traditions and because they were pretty.
The other constant was the photo-op with Santa who would visit OK Bazaars in town in about the November to begin the countdown to his breaking and entering of your house. A few things to note from the photos are: Santa was also a constant, he must have been sick in 1961. Also the gift pack was tightly grasped.
The waiting for Xmas was endless and the anticipation on the eve was unbearable. It would be difficult to get to sleep and naturally the kids would be the first up to check that the presents had actually been delivered. There was another unbearable wait while Mom got her act together before we could rip open our presents like a feral pack. There would be a lot of excited screaming at each other, “Look what I’ve got”. After things settled down and we had played with our toys a bit, the next long wait started. We always visited the Stirk girls next door to show off our presents and to see theirs. As Mrs Stirk was a refined and cultured lady, we had to wait for a respectable hour. One Christmas I was given a yellow construction toy about half my size. It was an articulated scraper and I anticipated many a happy hour moving sand from one part of our deserted flower beds to another. It was the best present that I’d ever got. The respectable time arrived and we climbed over a low part of the split pole fence between our back yards. Dragging my huge toy over, the articulated part snagged and broke off. I was devastated. If it was tin, Dad could have fixed it but, being plastic, he could not. My present had lasted all of two hours.
The other fun part of Christmas was decorating the tree and the house. We always got our tree from the coloureds who lived next to 17th Ave before they got forcibly removed. The coloureds would earn a bit of extra money over Christmas by chopping down trees and displaying them along the road. The tree would be propped up in a bucket filled with bricks and put in the corner of the lounge. The serious work of decorating would begin. The box of goodies would be hauled out and the trusty decorations slowly augmented with more colourful and tinselly bits added each year. Then the room would be decorated. We would cut paper into strips and glue chains together using our pot of reduced horses hooves glue applied with a little brush. When the fancy paper ran out we would just continue with newspaper until there wasn’t any more space to hang them.
Around about when I was in Std 3, Dad decided that he was not going to buy a Christmas tree. This was a disaster. But he didn’t reckon with me – I could be a determined little shit at times. I cadged some cash from Mom for my worthy quest, got some rope and rode off on my bicycle. There was only one bicycle in the house but since I rode it the most, I considered it mine. The distance involved was not far, about 2km but in between was the fearsome Baakens Valley, euphemistically known as The Dip. This is virtually a gorge running through Port Elizabeth. It was great fun going down if your brakes worked, but you could only make it about a third of the way up if you had not been too heavy on the brakes before. I selected a tree about 6’ tall, tied the braches together and strapped it to my crossbar. It was a very long and prickly push home, particularly up from the bottom of The Dip. Needless to say, Dad didn’t demur buying a tree the next year.
The Dip, driving towards Newton Park (Yee Gads! There’s streetlights and a cycle path now)
I didn’t know about the Grinch then as we never had Dr Seuss books at home. When I first saw him in a movie with my daughter I thought, “Well, that’s Dad”.