Re-Living Christmas: Cherished moments and memories #16

The kind that you take a Matatu,

Or drive to a mall,

Then take a trolley

And drive it through rows and rows of merchandise,

Picking and loading it with stuff,

Or enter a changing booth

And try out several outfits,

Was unheard of back then.

I don’t recall anything close

To the shopping spree of today.

May be it was done behind the scenes.

May be I was too young to notice.

May it’s because I wasn’t the one paying…

Or may be…just may be…we have made some progress…

I got some new stuff then, for sure.

And we also had some noticeable

And sizable Christmas purchases back then,

Especially of food and drinks,

But those were a distant cousin,

Compared to what we do today.

I never heard or knew there was a Black Friday back then,

The nearest town being several kilometers away,

Through rough, muddy and treacherous roads.

We didn’t have village supermarkets back then.

The best we had were kiosks and open-air markets

That sold only practical common user items

Like needle and thread,

Flour and cooking fat (oil is very recent!).

And there weren’t many decisions to make back then

Coz’ the choices were few

From an equally few outlets —

For wheat flour we had only EXE,

For cooking fat it was either Kimbo or Cowboy.

For washing soap we had only Omo.

Juice we had only Tree-Top.

And of course there was the eternally youthful

Blue-Band and Coca Cola.

Most of the new things

We had for Christmas

Came with my brothers and sisters

From the big towns.

For clothes, they just guessed my size

And hoped they will fit.

There were many times when something I liked very much

Had to be stored away

Until I was big enough to fit into it (😬),

And on other times, something turned out too small

And had to be given to someone else (sob sob😢)!

Shopping for Christmas for me

Meant rice, sugar, tea leaves

And wheat flour for chapatis.

Everything else came from the farm,

The weekly open air market,

Or from distant towns i had never seen!

* Follow us in the next two months, in this “Re-living Christmas’ series, to catch a glimpse of cherished moments and memories of our time.