No time like this Christmas present

By Tony Deyal

At 19, I had just started teaching a secondary school and to show my true colours I bought a blue Casio watch and was the same colour, expect much darker, when I passed near a “stand-pipe” and water got into the mechanism. I was blue vex because I should have known better. We used to say that the rain had to just “set-up” and threaten to fall to make the Casio get water inside it. So, with the girls watching me closely and asking or suggesting “Where (or wear) your watch”, I decided to see if I could get my parents or those of the children to whom I had given “lessons”, to pass on a watch to me as my Christmas gift.

My request did not tick with them and later, thinking about it, I realised that I was ahead of my time. I had sent all of them a message which read, “There is no time like the present; and no present like the time.” The main thing was that I wasted time on them and they had no time for me.

I was thinking about using that story in this Christmas column when I saw an article in one of my favourite Newspapers, the Jamaica Gleaner (the other is the Barbados Nation), that made me not just watch but take the time to read it. The title was “Deck the Halls” and they didn’t mean Wesley (the cricketer) and his family. And although they ignored the famous female film star, Holly Hunter, they were thinking about Holly Wood and not Hollywood.

The article was named “Deck the Halls” but, after some contemplation, I added “with boughs of holly!” and a “tralala la lah” or two for good measure. Initially I thought of all of Yew reading this article. After all, better Yew than me especially since some of you would ask with disdain, “Who Yew?” While I don’t have a problem getting any of Yew under my skin and singing, “Yew got me babe”, I prefer to keep your friendship by pledging “Yew nighted we stand” knowing that derided you might fall on me. Worse, in my wonderings around the Caribbean I am yet to see a partridge in a peer tree but I have seen a lot of pine trees with beautiful birds like the Bahama Warbler.

The high treeson of putting Yew before Holly took me back to Christmas 2010 in Antigua. I had heard the song, “Little Christmas Tree” with the lines, “No one to buy me give yourself to me, my little Christmas Tree.” I was a bit down and decided to cheer up myself and my family. I started with, “A visiting minister asked the Sunday School class, ‘Children, what weapon did Samson use to fight the Philistines?’ None of the children could tell him.  ‘I am sure you know the answer,’ he said consolingly. ‘Let me help you.’

He then tapped his jaw with one finger and asked, ‘What is this?’  The class, memories now restored, shouted in chorus, ‘The jawbone of an ass!”  Most of the time, however, kids might not be as sharp or may have started with the wrong “ass-umptions”, so to speak.  In Elementary School, one kid’s memory was so hazy that when asked what Samson did to the Philistines, he came up with the unique though mixed-up explanation that Samson took a bone and “jab” them in their rear end (although he did not use that exact word). Maybe I should have used an ass-terisk to indicate what he said.

There are many similar creative forays into religion by youngsters who are not too clear about the words or the facts. This is why you hear that “Joan of Ark was Noah’s wife”, and “Lot’s wife was a pillar of salt by day but a ball of fire at night.”  Those, whose lot it is to come into contact with both kids and religion simultaneously, have many examples: “The Epistles were the wives of the Apostles”; “St Paul converted to Christianity. He preached holy acrimony, which is another name for marriage”; “A Christian should have only one spouse. This is called monotony”; and “Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption”.

I particularly like: “The Egyptians were all drowned in the dessert. Afterwards, Moses went up to Mount Cyanide to get the ten amendments” and “The seventh commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery.”

Sometimes kids get their hymns and prayers wrong. There is one young lady who, perhaps misled by Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, sang, “Gladly, the cross-eyed bear” instead of “Gladly, the Cross I’ll bear” from the hymn, “Keep Thou My Way”. One little boy prayed fervently, “Our Father, who art in heaven, Howard be thy name…” But the one that really appeals to me is this version of the Catholic prayer, “Hail Mary, full of grapes, the Lord is a tree…”

I take her view one step further and believe that if the Lord has to be a tree it will be a Christmas tree. My mother was fifteen when she had me. Her first marriage was at 12 and her second at 14. She had no childhood so she made up for it by making Christmas important to both of us. She usually bought a tree made from wire and green painted paper which we covered with foil and metallic tinsel, hanging artificial bulbs and pine cones on it, and then covering it with artificial snow sprayed from a can. Did we worry about singing “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” with Bing Crosby?

No siree. The thought, the event, the occasion were like Rudolf’s red nose, lighting up the present and the future. If the stick of a blind man creates a new darkness, the hopes of a young child and his still young mother illuminated heaven and earth.

For me, the tree is literally the root, branch and heart of my Christmas. It is the sparkle and the soul. For many years now, we have used a live pine tree. At one time, when we lived in Trinidad, we bought a new tree every year and then planted it outside to bind the soil together as it bound the family together in the preceding Christmas. In Belize, one of our friends gave us a tree from her farm and as strangers in a land that was no longer strange, we thanked her and God for the gift.

In Antigua, pine trees were expensive so every Christmas we took one inside, dressed it in Christmas splendor, lighted up its life, purpose and meaning for a while and put it back into the sunlight with a story for its growing children. We will do the same in Trinidad when our two children, Jasmine and Zubin, are with us. But this year, we will celebrate not the children but the pine of astonishment and solemnly say, “Take a bough, pine tree!”

* Tony Deyal was helping his wife Indranie put up the curtains in the children’s bedrooms when he remembered the joke about the man who went to a psychiatrist claiming that he felt like a pair of curtains. The doctor responded sharply, “Stop this at once and pull yourself together!”