I'm not sure if I mentioned it before but I grew up retail. This means that to me Christmas was not only preparing and consuming copious amounts of food or exchanging gifts, it meant the lead up to Christmas Eve as people purchased gifts (and in the latter years personal effects to adorn themselves for the Christmas Eve lime or whatever fete has commandeered that night). One would find us staying up to the wee hours of Christmas morning selling to the last minute shopper who decided at hour 0 to buy their cousin a gift or their sister. But I've changed.
I don't know if it because I'm older or because I'm over it but the Christmas Eve experience has changed. It feels cheap and relegated to the young who now have an excuse to walk the streets of St. John's with abandon. I see women dressed in various levels of undress and I'm sickened. Don't worry, I've accepted I'm a prude and I don't see the sense of my fellow women wearing tops as dresses.
Of late, I'm envying my father who is at home sleeping as we sit around waiting for another customer to pop in and buy magnetic earrings or eyelashes (medium, of course). I feel myself yearning for a tradition where I spend the days leading up to Christmas reading Charles Dickens' The Christmas Carol, as I think of ways to re-write it with a Caribbean twist. Or curling up with lover, as the rain hits the window pane instead of slouching over gift sets that refuse to sell.
As a new generation hits the streets of St. John's, I see a lost generation, one that is looking for guidance. But somehow they feel so far gone. I know that the future leaders of our nation are at home in the embrace of their family but it doesn't deny the fact that there are so many who embrace the consumer culture to the degree that they will always be impoverished and at the mercy of their employer and the government, in some cases they are one and the same.
When did self-respect disappear into the cesspool of the desire to possess something that would make one look "cool"?
When did women want to out do the women of the night?
When did I stop having faith in the future generation and what they were capable of doing? But did I ever think of what they were capable of doing?
I am getting old and I am over it. I feel like this part of my life is turning, changing from a youthful green to the decaying red and browns. And for my life to flourish, I feel like it has to be pruned. What will Christmas 2016 bring? I'm not sure yet, but I'm hoping for a different venue, a full night's sleep, a chance for a new beginning, a new tradition.
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