Honestly, one of the best parts of the Christmas season is the nostalgia that it invokes in everyone. It’s a season that just automatically makes you start thinking about the past. A time when you were younger, and things were much better for you. At a time when life was so much easier, and you didn’t have a lot of things to stress you. For many of us, that period was only during our childhood.
When I think of the Christmas season, I think of harmattan, fancy clothes and shoes, lots and lots of knockouts and fireworks, enough to make anyone deaf. And even most importantly, rice. Boy, there was always rice! There was a lot of rice in the house, and also in the houses of friends and family that we went to visit during the holidays. Usually, it’s impossible to be hungry during the season. As a matter of fact, it’s that one time of the year when children will see their favorite food and run in the opposite direction. That’s just how good it can get.
Of course, things have changed now. Like, by a lot! For starters, we’re all adults now, and suddenly, we’re the ones providing all that rice and fancy clothes. We’re the ones paying for those fireworks and knockouts. Imagine my surprise when I found out these things didn’t fall from the sky. Neither were they delivered by Fr. Christmas! Like, WTF?????
Honestly, the problem for me isn’t even the monetary aspect or the fact that I have to provide it all. The problem is just that there is no motivation to do so anymore. No Christmas spirit, no nostalgia. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong. Government policies, a crashing economy, climate change, everything is messing with what the Christmas spirit is meant to be.
So now, what’s my favorite Christmas memory? For me, I’ve had a lot of really good ones, but the older I got, the more it lost its spark. And for this post, I’d highlight the last real Christmas I had. This was somewhere between 2016-2018, not too sure which anymore. Anyway, that was the last year my friends and I were all in the same place at the same time.
That day was easily one of the best of our lives. Not because we did anything crazy, but because we just let loose and enjoyed the season as kids. On the day, we went to each of our houses, one after the other, like jobless people. It was a holiday, so who was gonna arrest us? Lol! We had fun going from place to place. By the time we were done, we went to some prominent members of our church’s house. We were pretty popular in church then, so this wasn’t an issue. We were simply sharing the Christmas cheer.
I spent the entire day with them, and I got home sometime around 9 PM that day. I was so tired and full that I spent more than half of Boxing Day in bed. But little did we know that it was the last Christmas we’d ever get to spend together. Not like anything happened to us, we’re all still alive and well, thank God. But life happened. Things started changing from the very next year. Some of us went off to school, others moved to a different place to find their place in life. Every once in a while, we return to base, and not at least two or three people will be missing, due to one reason or the other. And to date, we’ve still not been able to make out time to reunite and catch up.
Like I said, life happens. It's still a day I remember fondly because it was that moment when we allowed ourselves to become boys, even if it was for a brief period. We just enjoyed the season, and then we moved. It’s just sad that it’s never going to happen again.
