Today is the seventh day of the year and most of us have moved past the new year celebration as we have returned to our usual daily routine and as for me, that means I have gone back to the university to resume my final year, and that means one word: stress.
But even as we have gone past the new year celebration, hive learners is still putting us in the mood with the series of topics for this week's featured contents and today's topic is all about remembering our best new year celebration and I will start talking about mine shortly.
I don't know about anyone else but my best new year celebrations were the ones I did with my extended family and those usually happen in the village. It has been a long time since the entire family gathered at my grandmother's house in the village but I still have a clear memory of the last one that happen and that's the one I want to talk about.
As usual, my family is the first one to travel to the village as early as the 20th of December while most of the other families arrive on Christmas day and the others arrive the day before the new year (December 31st). One of my wealthy uncles is part of those that arrive on new year's eve and he usually comes with a lot of presents and food items which will be used for the new year's celebration.
The celebration started on the night of new year's eve and a goat was killed with some parts of it used to prepare pepper soup while some other parts were used to prepare a local Igbo delicacy called Nkwobi. One of my uncles knows how to tap palm wine and he brought a lot of kegs of fresh palm wine. I ate a lot of goat meat and also drank lots of palm wine before going to bed.
The next day, most of us went to church in the morning while the others stayed back at home to start cooking. When we got back from church, most of the cooking was done but I didn't eat anything heavy as I just took bread, fried eggs, and tea. Later in the afternoon, I went to the kitchen and met lots of foods ranging from pounded yam or fufu and egusi soup, fried rice and coleslaw, rice and tomato stew and also African salad (abacha); I could pick anyone I want.
I settled for pounded yam and egusi soup but I took a little portion of it because I planned on going back to the kitchen later to take fried rice and coleslaw 😆. One hour after eating the pounded yam and egusi soup, I went back and took fried rice and also collected a drink from the fridge. I ate with my cousins and we talked about different events happening in our lives.
Later in the evening, I and one of my cousins went to a place in the village simply known as "center" (I still don't know why it's called center, maybe it's the center of the village?). My sister's and my other cousins left earlier because I was sleeping and when I woke up, my other cousin was still at home and both of us went there.
This place called center is a very big field and has a lot of people visiting it; they simply came to watch masquerades. Masquerades are an important part of a lot of celebrations in the eastern part of Nigeria and a lot of us love watching them chase people around with whips and huge canes. Most of the crowd usually stands on a small hill and watches the masquerades as they walk up and down at the bottom of the hill.
Some confident youths who want to get chased around by the masquerades will go down the hill and challenge them. They get chased around while the rest of us cheer in excitement until they are finally caught and flogged 😆 but some escape back to the top of the hill. Aside from the masquerades, there are also other attractions like a football match (there's a mini stadium there), lots of fireworks, games, and also street foods.
My cousin and I decided to start heading back home when the day was getting dark. On the way, he decided to buy a new energy drink that recently hit the market (black bullet). After drinking it, he started acting crazy after some minutes and that was when I realized he was drunk. It turned out that it's the blue variant of this drink that is an energy drink (blue bullet), and the black one is vodka. He ended up taunting a few masquerades who were returning home and they gave us a hot chase.
We ran like crazy and hid in an abandoned store until the masquerade left. We came out and started laughing as we found our way home. Later at night, I had a plate of pepper soup and some palm wine (Which at this point is no longer fresh). I became tipsy afterward and had to go to sleep early.
The next day, some of my relatives started returning to the city and I wished we could do something like that again the following year but sadly, we haven't had the opportunity to gather like that again since then because everyone is just too busy these days. That remains one of my best new year celebrations and I still wish I could have something like that again one day.
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