Christmas Memories in the Village
By: Ramogi Okello K Amimo
Tags: Village, Christmas, Motivacional, Africa, Lovestory

Photo from African Promise

Such holiday festivities remind me of uncle Ammon and his Christmas tradition. At this time of the year, he would have arrived in the countryside with my two cousins from Nakuru a few weeks ago. The break preceding the Christmas day was spent playing games with our poor Dholuo-speaking cousins from hide-and-seek to football — ajwala. The better part of the holiday is the availability of sliced bread in every breakfast, not time spent working on the farm or house pavements in case Jesus was to be born in our house. Grandma always argued that we had to make our home neat even though it was a mud-walled house since we never knew if that was the place that Christ would be born.

The first thing on a Christmas morning would be a breakfast with a table filled with bread, blueband, roasted groundnuts, mandazi, boiled and roasted maize, and thick milk tea. Villagers like myself would only form unique relations with mandazi, bread and blueband; we knew that relationship was short-lived. It would dissipate with the departure of uncle Ammon and our cousins back to the city. I remember my older cousin, Adhiambo, never liked blueband. Hence, she had a special ‘blueband’ that tasted really sweet like honey but looked reddish in color. I later learned that it was called a jam. I wondered what the difference was besides the sweetness. I cared less about the difference to me; the bottom-line was that whichever option came with bread.

Who knew about ‘Santa Claus’! If there was a Santa, my uncle must have been one.

A few days before Christmas, uncle Ammon would show us how to decorate the house with balloons. He seems to have had many balloons since it came with a pump that we could use to inflate them. Unlike the micro-balloons we bought from the local kiosk for five shillings, these balloons were similar and easy to blow. We would hang them on our mud-wall, some on the picture frames of aunts and uncles — some of who had passed away.

The expression on her dreadful eyes meant we were already past tense — dead.

On Christmas Eve, we traditionally went to kesha — overnight church service. Our local church was always filled with lots of joy during this time. The service would begin about two hours to midnight with drums, songs, and praises. At that time, it felt like a survival obligation to attend these services because you could not live under grandma’s roof if you did not go to her church. Otherwise, we would have wished to go to the Anglican Church, where they always had a cinema to watch the birth of Jesus. However, the beauty of our church is that once it hit midnight, the service was done.

Photo from Business Live

After breakfast, we would go for a brief church service in Bondeni church located within the homestead. Sometimes, the church service would be at Miruka Parish or Nyiera Diocese. When it was out at the parish or diocese level, we would traditional shower or quickly wash our feet and faces, take breakfast, change into our Christmas-best, and off we went. Assuming we had a service at Bondeni, we would wash our feet after breakfast, change into our best clothes and go to church. Christmas best did not guarantee much loathed new and trendy Christmas clothes, it was always clothes we kept just for travel — sometime we’d outgrow them before we got new ones. Sometimes, I would be the one to ring the bell at 8 a.m., reminding people that it was about that time to go worship.