Night Light

As a child, the smell of the mustard and brown sugar caramelizing on the Sikafi ham was by far my fondest Christmas season memory. Well, maybe, second only to the bragging rights for my finesse in being able to untangle the intimidating coils of knotting Christmas lights that had hibernated in the attic all year long.  Lights…Yes, lights are so integral to the Christmas adrenaline rush that it is the only time Southside families will excuse lights being on in the room when no one is in there. The lights illuminate our bliss, and brighten our hopefulness while highlighting our vulnerably festive mood. Mind you, the nippy weather has played its part this year, as well, at a time when our wallets were only warming our rear protuberances.

The Christmas season is a time which trips both the guilty rich and most disadvantaged poor into an innocently childish stupor filled with twinkle eyed anxiety and all the trimmings of fanciful promises. For as long as I can remember, the use of decorative, festive lighting during the Christmas holiday season  was the visual fire cracker, the night light flashing, that caroled the season into being. It was surely these hypnotic twinklings that each year lulled the overworked and stressed out masses of this Mosquito Coast, pacifying them that it is okay to take their shoes off and wriggle their toes in the Christmas air.

Although, no Belizean can appreciate the secular roots of festive, holiday –season lighting, or celebratory lighting, the use of lights during winter solstice festivals pre-dates Christianity.

Yet the Christian crossover is flagged by the early Christians who were persecuted for having worship gatherings. A single candle hung in the window signified where worshipers would assemble for Christian fellowship in a community. Eventually, the practice of using lights in the holiday season was affixed to the introduction of the illuminated tree which became a Christian Christmas tradition in Germany during the Early Modern period. The illuminated Christmas tree took root in the United Kingdom during Queen Victoria’s reign, maybe as early as 1832, and through emigration spread to the Americas and Australia.

What seems now, in hindsight, to be a dangerous practice was the reality of these illuminated Christmas trees which was literally the lighting of candles and placing them directly on the tree. There are libraries of ad hoc reasons for the “meaning” of Christmas lights, but most of them are after-the-fact assumptions, and not authentic historical explanations. So while in my continuing readings I can find no definitive reason for this tradition, I personally believe that candles on the tree were originally used to remind the viewer of the starry night on which Jesus was born.

Funny enough what modern parlance considers holiday “lights” were first invented by Edward H. Johnson, the Vice President of, guess what? An electricity company!   Yap, this surely does not help to muffle the static of my conspiracy theory nightmares. When I look at Stan Marshall’s bill wrapped in BEL’s gift paper at the height of maaga season next year, I will foam at the mouth to think that an associate of the inventor Thomas Edison and a Fortune 500 capitalist created the string of lights which make my meter spin like a silver Frisbee.

Anyway, electric ornamental Christmas lights are the feel good center of all free spirited Belizeans homes. In fact, it may be the singularly telling sign that Cruffy “di feel di krismus”. We are so hell bent on Christmas revelries, rum drinking and merry making that we not only believe the old adage that “krismus and funeral bring dey own money” but we also live it. Lights say “krismus deh yah” but more importantly that we can afford it.

In the good old days, I would stick my head out of my father’s taxi as he barked at me for being hard ears but understanding that these drives around the city to see the lights was as close as he could come to putting us in a mansion by the sea with a security booth in the front.  These light seeing tours were normally in the first week of December, when the lights were fresh and before that one bulb in the series of lights could mess up the entire arrangement. Today, the vestiges of my childhood traditions which has spilled over as part of my commitment to keep my thumb on the pulse of my people, caused me to get in my car and take my family to awe the thoughtful external displays of decorative lights in the old capital.

This year, however, my trip was just last week, – imagine that!!! –  because no one had up lights. It was bad. We went into Kings Park because although no house on my street had put up lights, you are sure to find lights in the affluent neighborhoods of the city.  Did I say it was bad? And the kind of bad, I must confess, was annoying. On St. Thomas Street, for example, only two houses had up ornamental lights. The first house was that of a Supreme Court judge, I was told. The second was the family house of Dean Barrow, which I am told, again, is being rented to Boots so he can hide from the people of Port Loyola.  Then I went to the Barrow’s rich neighborhood on Seashore Drive, where at the park on the sea side – imagine again – there were only two houses that teasingly bragged with lights apart from his righteous holiness the Prime Minister. One was the house of a rabid UDP supporter and the other was the house of the brother of Zenaida’s de facto Deputy Mayor, Wayne Usher.

As a vagrant once said while looking into the lights of one of those red plate ministerial vehicles, “watch ya we ga mouth too!!!!!” The story of the lights is a big one. People in Belize are not living. They are curled up in terror of what will happen next year and how bad it will be under these UDP clots. Things bad! No one can afford Christmas let alone enjoy it. This Government has given us no reason for good tidings.

Mr. Price, please forgive me this year if I don’t do the patriotic and Christian PUP thing by writing with hope to light up all Belizeans at this time of year. But I do this because frankly and admitted unfairly, I am tempted to adapt the proven slogan “Don’t blame me I voted PUP.”  So I blow my Christmas bugle for only two groups, the masses of voters who were despondent in the last elections choosing to stay home and to my fellow PUP’s. We have had a difficult year, but to paraphrase Mr. Price in his speech at the luncheon: in us and through us, was born the political hope of the people. So my message to you in the words of the American poet Grace Noll Crowell, is “whatever else be lost among the years, Let us keep Christmas still a shining thing: Whatever doubts assail us, or what fears, Let us hold close one day, remembering its poignant meaning for the hearts of men. Let us get back our childlike faith again”.

Season’s Greetings my fellow PUPs!!!

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