It’s Christmas time again!

David Mungoshi Shelling the Nuts
There’s something that’s just a little too tragic, though nostalgic, about visiting places you’ve been to before, thinking you’ll find them the same as when you were that wide-eyed little one wondering about everything.

At the end of primary school, feeling rather big and accomplished, I went to this tree that had been there like forever, at the edge of the football pitch. It had thick fleshy bark that wept when you cut into it. Although I didn’t know it at the time I was grappling with the existential question of being or not being — the worrisome question about whether we are real or just an illusion.

We wonder how people in posterity will ever know that once we were here: walking, breathing, gazing up at the sky and wondering if there are other worlds up there. Your mother at some time must have told you about the woman on the moon making her way home at sunset with a baby on her back and a load of firewood on her head.

So I cut my name into the tree trunk to leave a mark of my presence at the school, this wondrous place where I had first learned how to read and write, the school where I learned that even Englishmen have funny names.

What with Mr Goodenough paying us a visit one morning, in the company of his wife, a fine lady in frills and laces and a chiffon in psychedelic colours.

Years later, I went to the tree and had the shock of my life. The tree had repaired itself by obliterating the cut with my name. The futility of it all!

Branching off on reveries is the true mark of a poet and I fancy myself as one. And the festive season is an opportune time for walks down memory lane.

In our time (those of my generation) the fashionable thing to do at Christmas was to travel to your rural home where you could dazzle rural folk with tales of the city and walk that peculiar walk that made people think you had a limp.

Working sons and husbands from the towns brought groceries and portable transistor radiograms on which they played the latest vinyl seven singles at top volume for all and sundry to hear.

The morning after your arrival you went round the village, greeting people and giving cigarettes and razor blades to a few old men, and of course, sugar to the old woman with the sweet tooth. The rest of the day she would be throwing sugar into her salivating mouth from a cupped palm and washing it down with water. Come Christmas Day, you shared your tea and bread with anyone who called in.

The last time I was home, in the countryside, all this had changed. Sorrowfully, I lamented the passing of good simple things urged on by a Ricky Nelson song. Ricky Nelson was a formidable rock star in his time.

After being eclipsed in the era of The Beatles, he came back from near-oblivion with “Garden Party”, a nostalgic song many people identified with. Garden Party captured the idea of time and disillusionment fused together and made you see the hopelessness of human efforts at immortality. His words still ring true today, when he sings:

I went to a garden party to reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share old memories and play our songs again
When I got to the garden party, they all knew my name
No one recognised me, I didn’t look the same

And yes, you guessed it, at some point I went back to a college where I had learned how to teach, years after it had folded and become something else. Like Ricky Nelson, no one recognised me, and worse than that, no one knew my name. It was a sobering experience.

The thing about Christmas is its renewal potential, and the hope placed in a baby born in a manger. For most people, Christmas is a feel-good story. Everyone subscribes to the idea of spoiling each other at Christmas.

Anticipating his demise, my father made me promise always to remember my mother at Christmas. We had great fun at Christmas: new clothes and more food than usual. The big treat was the bread that Father baked on an open fire with ngoto, a potent home brew, in place of yeast.

Now that it’s Christmas time again, the memories come flooding back: the food, the sharing, and the joyful church service where the old priest paid tribute to his predecessors with the enigmatic words: “Baba Chipunza, Baba Munyavhi, Brother Shed and Baba Cripps. These men of faith did some great work here, in their time.”

That old priest sure made people smile.