I BEGAN my columnist career at the Stabroek News in 1988 and since then, I have written for all the other major Guyanese newspapers. Since then, it was natural for me (I don’t know about other columnists worldwide), to focus on Christmas each year. After 35 years of writing about Christmas, what else is there to say about Christmas in my country?

I confess, I don’t know if I have exhausted the topics that revolve around Christmas in Guyana. I don’t know what to write about Christmas as my index finger (I type with one finger only; it is true) moves on the keyboard. I thought of comparing the era I was born into with the present generation. This was the comparison journalist Leonard Gildarie asked me to make last Friday on the Freddie Kissoon-Gildarie Show as we did our last programme for the holiday season.

I never had a swashbuckling or enjoyable or fun-filled or memorable holiday season while growing up. We simply did not have enough to make Christmas Day enjoyable. My mom made Christmas cake, but that was about it. My dad was a groundsman at St. Stanislaus College and by the time I arrived in the world, there were already six other siblings to feed. My father’s pay packet could hardly have met the requirements of a good Christmas.

I had one and only one Christmas gift in my entire childhood. My mom bought a green water-gun and when I was five years old. I kept that gun and each year, it became my Christmas gift for that year. I hid it away on top of the window sills and it remained there for decades. It remained a psychic connection even after I left Guyana to study.

When I came home in 1979 for my father’s funeral, I checked on it and it was still there. By that time, I had married Janet Mohamed from my ward of Wortmanville (she was from Bent Street, I from Hadfield Street). I thought I would give my daughter that gun for a symbolic reason to remind her of my financial history.

That was not to be. After I returned to Canada from my father’s funeral, our house fell down the very next year and that potent part of my history was lost forever.

This water-gun story is all I can think of as I write about Christmas 2023. But this I know — that green-water gun has left a Freudian footprint indelibly implanted on the walls of my mind. It lives within my soul reminding me that people need to live, and we who have must ensure we contribute to the birth of an environment so others can live and not have an existence full with deprivations.

It was a call-in programme last Friday on the Freddie-Kissoon-Gildarie Show, and I was worked up when one caller denounced the spread of vendors where he lived on Dennis Street in Sophia. I could not disagree with the encumbrances vending creates, but I strongly made the point that if the rich and the very rich pay their rates and taxes, then maybe there could be a workable solution to street-vending.

I remind you that prominent citizen, Ralph Ramkarran, wrote this year that the rates and taxes his father paid in the early 1970s are the same he is paying for the same property. I am not a fan of the City Council but the revelation of Mr. Ramkarran brings into sharp focus the plight of vendors. Society must not drive the poor and powerless out to the sea. I believe a country’s wealth must be shared and I will never abandon that ideological motif, ever.

One day, the former GRA head, Kurshid Sattaur (deceased) showed me the amount of taxes the self-employed paid, including all types of professional classes. He asked me to do a column on it and I did. Kurshid had showed me a response he got from Mr. Rex Mc Kay after he wrote to him concerning PAYE contributions.

Sorry, about this digression from the Christmas topic, but I think it was relevant because it underscores the point that the poorer classes need to enjoy the Christmases that I could not have while growing up in Wortmanville. I think Christmas 2023 was bigger than all the others gone by. One huge fact testifies to this. Never before during the Christmas season was Regent Street traffic reshaped to accommodate Christmas shopping.

Because of the deluge of shoppers, Regent Street was turned into a one-way going west only. My soulful condolences to the families of the five fallen heroes from our army and country too. This Christmas will never be the same after that tragedy. But please enjoy this day and let it be memorable. Memories don’t leave like people do. They always stay with you