By Orin Gordon
CHRISTMAS day was a gorgeous one — sun-filled, breezy, pleasant. In the part of central Trinidad in which I live, it was beautifully still and quiet, except for the noisy but brief revving of a high-performance motorcycle one street away.

Those of us who took to the road to visit relatives for Christmas dunch – the extended, late meal that occurs too late in the day to be called lunch and too early to be properly described as dinner – found traffic conditions to be unusually accommodating.

Long ago, here in Guyana, the mom would toil until early into Christmas morning, cooking and cleaning. “You can’t sit there”, she’d tell us curtly, pointing to a chair. We’d wake up to the smell of fresh baked bread, and troop to the Christmas tree, in pajamas, to open our presents.

Breakfast was still-warm bread dipped in Pepperpot. It also consisted of garlic pork, pickled onions and cuts of ham. Ginger beer that early was optional.

Guyana has had a great migratory push over the past four decades. The US-based Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are half-a-million Guyanese living outside of the country, compared to a Guyana-resident population of about 800,000. In 40 years, the in-country population has hardly changed.

High-level, sustained migration has effectively caused Guyana to stand still in population terms. By contrast, India’s population has almost doubled from 700 million to 1.3 billion in that time. Nigeria’s has almost tripled, from 73 million, to 211 million.

However, the forces of migration are not strong enough to change our traditional Christmas day fare. As difficult as cassareep may be to procure in, say, Sydney or Copenhagen, Guyanese there will find a way to roll out their Pepperpot and garlic pork. Trinidadians and Tobagonians will roll out their home-styled ham and pastelles (like conkie, but with meat) wherever in the world they are.

What our increasingly cosmopolitan presence and far-flung migration have done is to add to the variety of our Christmas fare, and our friends and families in all parts of the world have shared some spectacular varieties with us on social media. When it comes to food at Christmastime, the world has shrunk.

Take turkey – the bird, not the country whose people would now like the rest of us refer to as Türkiye. Turkey long ago entered the Christmas chat, thanks mainly to our American friends and family. The big supermarkets in the Caribbean sell high-priced, imported turkey; but a fair few people I know leave it off the Christmas day menu because they find it too much of a challenge to cook to the right degree of succulence.

The Christmas day food and feasting were spectacular, but gone are the days I’d engage in belly-bursting eating. Two meals on the day were more than sufficient. For breakfast, two beef pastelles, a couple of sticks of focaccia in an olive oil and herbal dip, a dollop of black cake, a small portion of ham, fresh fruit and black coffee. That was it. The less modest dunch was baked chicken with stuffing, ham, roast pork, mac and cheese and plenty of salad. Dessert was a half slice of rum-infused black cake. Portions were small, and the plate wasn’t piled high, as in Christmases past.

The older you get, the more counter-productive that becomes. Our metabolism slows over time, and it’s more work to throw the pounds off. For others, organs such as the pancreas increasingly can’t take the strain. Diabetic Christmases can’t be fun. My grandfather used to joke that we prefer to die eating, rather than engage in dieting. He wasn’t wrong.

We define Christmas mainly by food, but there’s much more to it. In some countries, this is the first season in three years in which public health precautions were relaxed enough to allow families to fully get together.

Some did last year as the curtain started to lift, but still didn’t take the risk of visiting elderly relatives. COVID-19 is poking its head above the parapet again, but that’s another conversation for another day.

Despite its beauty, Christmas is for many an occasion to be endured, rather than enjoyed. We really miss the departed. Not all get-togethers are created equal. Some involve the divorced, the remarried and the alternating of children between one camp and the next. From one year to the next, and even one day to the next.

It sometimes brings together people who can’t bear to be in the same room with each other. That’s not just the formerly married, it’s siblings, parents and children. And no messages of goodwill from the Pope is going to heal things. Christmas puts a strain on pockets, and, for the less resourced, it is an exercise in holding your nerve till it all passes.

In the hours leading up to Christmas day, the forces of Vladimir Putin launched an attack which resulted in the death of at least 10 people in Kherson, southern Ukraine, by shelling the already battered city. Greg Abbott, the governor of the US state of Texas, dumped a busload of asylum seekers – in the teeth of a deep freeze – outside the Washington DC residence of Vice-President Kamala Harris, just to make a political point.

Abbott and Putin probably attended Christmas-eve or Christmas morning mass, and heard of the mercy of Jesus and Christian charity towards fellow men. Christmas is wonderful, but it’s not all feast and light.

The author is a communications consultant, at oringordon.com