Why the love and appreciation for reading and Rooks are necessary as a functioning capacity in relation to Christmas, is the same reason why generally these factors are essential for living in the 21st century. But with the celebration of Christmas, with its tremendous symbolisms and rituals to have a general understanding of what we can extract as its tenets against what we may have generally interpreted from in-house practices and customs, the exchange of ideas through reading is a great benefit.

` To read was necessary for many of us growing up with Christmas and Christ in disputes of who Christmas belongs to; what did the mother of Jesus look like: did Jesus, the Christ live? etc. But before we (my generation) arrived at that argumentative age as young adults, reading was a necessary part of the arsenal of group arguments and debates, separating facts from opinion, and winning bets. In school, reading was on the timetable. As you passed to Fourth Standard onto Form One, Literature was a subject.

The education system by then had dropped Scripture as a subject. But further on, as young parents, we understood the obvious, as young adults, that the season of Christmas involved children BIG TIME. That’s when toys, games, story books and boys and girl annuals appeared, all directed at young minds, and comic books, all foreign, with none of us in it, except for Mandrake, Phantom and Tarzan, with colonial propaganda inclusions. I must include that the commercialism of Christmas, with literature, did develop fixed livelihoods of niche employment. In every market across Georgetown (I can’t report for the rural markets, but I know that shops did sell comic books and magazines, depending on the village), there were multiple second-hand book stands that made revenue from selling, exchanging and renting novels, school books, comic books and forbidden books, to juveniles; a children’s world of reading existed.

A pivotal feature was the Sunday papers that carried a pullout section of mixed illustrated strips that countless children were hooked on. How are these items relevant to Christmas? That atmosphere of adventure, whether Sci-fi, comic strips, Hero characters or love stories, attracted the young, though quietly read by adults, and most of all integrated a fixed place for children and the young at heart as an acknowledged component of society. To which Christmas and its displays of toys, competitions like the Fogarty’s Toy Grab, conducted on the radio by the incredible voice of ‘Uncle’ James Sydney (I think that it was a road Safety crossword that had to be filled, towards winning) complemented that fixed place.

True, today we have vast social media realms and Netflix options, but do all Guyanese homes have smartphones, computers and afforded subscriptions to entertainment subscribers? How many social media realms that adults/young adults find interesting on their smart phones are ‘child friendly? Yet, children are exposed to them, whether you want them to or not.
We are possibly creating adults too soon due to a juvenile void and shaping another generation of damaged humans. A Judge recently lamented that “sexual offences against children are at a crisis levels” the other fact is that in most cases, to my observation, the perpetrators are themselves reasonably young. The perp linked to that case was thirty-nine years old when this happened, the victim a nine-year-old child.

I grew up hearing and witnessing the pointing out of old men and women who it was said by gossip, liked to touch younger people, but barriers are not sustained today as they were then, and ‘then’ was not a perfect world either. The concept of dressing children up, mimicking adult styles, is off, and I’ve witnessed this happen, and its consequences should have been foreseen, the child was twelve but dressed like a seductive eighteen-year-old and ended up pregnant too soon. However, that topic, though related, is a separate discussion that I will revisit. The connection between Christmas and reading lies primarily with the opening of the discussion faculties of the child through the exploration realms of books that you can discuss the storyline with. You can be engaged in discussions with children if you leave the door open to them in that area, its important, even on the morals of superheroes, historical heroes and the leading characters that they find captivating in literature, whether nonfiction or novels.

Christmas is the only holiday with distinct relevance enveloping history, religion, mythology and stark social symbolisms with an appeal to human nature’s wide and contradictory expressions. If we adults are serious about where our world is going with rumours of impending genocide using science, there is no greater time to address the world we live in with our children through this one holiday, and it’s narrative, that can explore good and evil in an adjusted real way and still be loyal to the selfsame mood of the season, while influencing the future through the building blocks of a wider perspective, in all this, Books play an essential part.