Hartley NeitaDURING THE years of my marriage, my late wife gave me an annual lesson in planning to prevent the danger of Christmas splurging.
Each year at the end of July, she took me shopping on King Street in Kingston to purchase Christmas gifts for our immediate family and extended relatives and friends. The names of those who would have gift packages under their Christmas trees were listed in a notebook. Each year, she added the names of new friends and relatives, and deleted the names of those who had migrated, either abroad or to another life above.
By November, all the shopping was done. We took advantage of the first week of the children's Christmas holidays from school, when they spent
the few days with their grandparents, to remove the gifts from the drawers of our bureau and the top shelf of our wardrobe and wrap and tag them.
We put away the gifts in a suitcase which we placed under our bed. Now at that time, all our friends had house parties at Christmas time, from mid-December onwards. Sometimes we had two and three parties to go to each night. We took the presents with us and by Christmas Eve they were all distributed. Except for those for our relatives which we distributed on Christmas morning.
That first Christmas Day, we discovered that no matter how detailed one's plans are, something always goes awry. We had just had breakfast when our neighbours knocked. During the few months we were living side by side we had become close friends, but somehow or the other they were not on our list. As we opened the door they began singing Merry Christmas, and in the wife's hands was a Christmas cake.
We had nothing for them.
GIFT WITHOUT A NAME
They were added to the list the following year, but to make sure we were never embarrassed again, from then on we always purchased a gift which we tagged without a name. That present was neither exclusively for a male or a female; a pen, for example. So when we saw someone arriving unexpectedly, my wife or I would rush to our bedroom, add the name of our visitor to the card, and come from the room singing Merry Christmas.
Now, it was true that we did not get caught in the Christmas rush to buy presents. This had two advantages. First we did not have the problem of trying to find somewhere to park, and the other was we got our gifts at pre-Christmas prices. However, when we had children, there were two occasions when we had to visit King Street.
The first occasion was to see the annual Santa Claus Christmas Parade. This was organised by Times Store every year. There were what seemed like miles and miles of floats, effigies of the then governor and of Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante, platoons of Girl Guides and Boy Scouts, and musical organisations such as the Alpha Boys Band, a calypso band and the Jamaica Military Band. The parade wound its way through St. Andrew and Kingston and ended at about noon at the foot of King Street. Santa Claus emerged from his carriage to the screams and shouts of thousands of children.
All afternoon, children were in a line on the sidewalk of King Street and ending in Times Store where Santa ho-ho-hoed. Parents bought a ticket for one shilling for each child and presented it to Santa, who in turn reached into his bag of goodies and gave them a beautifully wrapped Christmas gift. For another fee, they could get their photograph taken, sitting on Santa's knee.
The second visit to King Street was on Christmas Eve night when vendors brought their wares and laid them out on the sidewalks from Port Royal Street to the Parade, north, south, east and west. Traffic was banned from King Street.
Pedestrians held hands with strangers and sang and danced on the road. Half of Kingston's and St. Andrew's homes were empty for at least three hours, and yet criminals seemed to have taken a night off to be on King Street. They even bought starlights, balloons and fi-fis from the vendors.
