THE festival of Christmas will resonate through the varied waves of its narratives into our human world again, whether we explore the depth of its content. We will seek to enjoy its season of happy songs and goodwill. We will embrace our creeds and holiday customs, ignoring the drama of betrayals, power struggles and evil.

Without pause, it does not hesitate to mystify. This drama, whether we perceive it as myth, captures the symbolisms of hope against the rigid selfcenteredness of human preservation, willing to trample on every principle of decency, and captures our imagination because it teaches.

We become enthralled by priestly kings, a cosmic constellation that is the herald which directs us to the mystical incarnation of knowledge within a miraculous son of ‘Mankind’, but even so, the circumstances of the world that envelopes us fill our thoughts with the eerie music of the worldly Pied Pipers, each with its haunting, irrational and contentious anthems. The latter reflects firmly on the eternally tortured crown of leaders who have replaced kings across time.

We Guyanese will remember this Christmas for the many things we were taught, regardless of how long it takes us to learn. It will be for those of us who awake on January 1, 2024 with a Christmas of dark, threatening possibilities to remember, and the tremendous struggle to make ends meet. With good faith, however, we will embrace the season’s symbolisms, creeds and customs, paying bills to ensure normalcy, and buying the repairing gifts necessary for the physical home, and ensuring there is enough to eat. We will all be somewhat conservative, without being Mr. Scrooge, because for most of us, our times have condemned us this way, but we will present gifts, especially to the folks that celebrate Christmas; this reference is to the young among our loved ones.

We must concede to the content of the Christmas story that it was the infant sons of men, according to the narrative, of up to two years old, who paid with their lives so the Christ Child may live. It is even more strange that such a remarkable child was not only alive in the dual lore of Africa.

There is a book that we who are interested in the ‘beliefs of our species’ will discover lies beyond just getting rich, a book named ‘THE WORLD SAVIORS’ by Rev. Charles H. Vail, which is a collection of saviours among men across cultures, human variations and distances, extracted from various cultures over centuries. That accounts for significant further reading. We will also learn by evaluation that the terrible things that the custodians of religion have committed in the name of this or that religion were the convenient interpretations of religious instructions to suit the egos and benefits of men, though this is not, of course, restricted to religion. The more we learn, the better we will be able to define the human world around us.

A closing example of the good and bad humans in the Christmas story is how desperate people can get to protect their comfort seat, as with King Herod, and how the innocent with their good tidings can unleash that desperate viciousness. The Wise Men (wise in their field) unleashed unprecedented evil, because they failed to see beyond King Herod’s smile what lurked beyond his knitted brow. In all, even Herod could not determine that the child was hidden within a common young woman and her grumbling, more mature husband, where intuition, through the eyes of angels, would instruct them to escape into Khemet, the land of the mystique of the ‘Maa Kheru’, ‘The Truth Speaker’, whom we will come to know as ‘The Christ’.