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Christmas Memories in the Village
Such holiday festivities remind me of uncle Ammon and his Christmas tradition. At this time of the year, he would have arrived in the countryside with my two cousins from Nakuru a few weeks ago. The break preceding the Christmas day was spent playing games with our poor Dholuo-speaking cousins from hide-and-seek to football — ajwala. The better part of the holiday is the availability of sliced bread in every breakfast, not time spent working on the farm or house pavements in case Jesus was to be born in our house. Grandma always argued that we had to make our home neat even though it was a mud-walled house since we never knew if that was the place that Christ would be born.
The first thing on a Christmas morning would be a breakfast with a table filled with bread, blueband, roasted groundnuts, mandazi, boiled and roasted maize, and thick milk tea. Villagers like myself would only form unique relations with mandazi, bread and blueband; we knew that relationship was short-lived. It would dissipate with the departure of uncle Ammon and our cousins back to the city. I remember my older cousin, Adhiambo, never liked blueband. Hence, she had a special ‘blueband’ that tasted really sweet like honey but looked reddish in color. I later learned that it was called a jam. I wondered what the difference was besides the sweetness. I cared less about the difference to me; the bottom-line was that…
