Saturday, May 5, 2012

The Teddybear and the Paper Hat



Luky;
Can you believe how the days fly by each year, until you wake up and find it's only eighteen more shopping days till Christmas?

I don't doubt that we'll have the annual Mrs. Grundies about the commercialisation around the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don't belong to their number. To me Christmas cards are the height of artistic perfection. No matter how highly coloured the picture of the sledge in the snow and the crimson robin on the green branch may be, I need to resort to the hankie I brought to wipe the sweat of Welkom's heat from my brow to wipe away a tear whenever my first Christmas card arrives.

At home we used to get lots of Christmas cards. How I resented the paltry little stock I received the first year I was married. It was bad enough living in a house without furniture but an empty mantelpiece on Christmas day was poverty indeed. I saved my three or four cards for a year and in the following year I produced them again. Added to the five or six we got then they made a goodly little show on my mantelpiece, even though they were mostly from the same people.

However, by that second Christmas we had a little baby who spent her days collapsing with laughter at the antics of her father. She got a teddybear in the mine Christmas tree. It had a tag on it, saying: 'My name is Sandy'. She pronounced it Sheshie with a Zulu intonation learned from the lady who cared for her when I was out at work in the day. So she, her daddy, the teddybear and I had our Christmas dinner together, she in her high chair, screaming with laughter at the sight of her father wearing a paper hat.

As time went by she got five brothers and sisters and hordes of pets and we were eventually so busy feeding them that we didn't even get much chance to check the postbox during the Christmas season. Yet I still get a lump in my throat each year when the first Christmas cards arrive and when I hear the first carol on the radio. And I drink a toast to the gifted artists who produce them year after year. Long may they continue to do so.

*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette. Please feel free to use copyright free for any worthy purpose
*Hear the wonderful Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing 'Silent Night' - click into the following link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2CHfZ9NP8k&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL6E478F2D88D89498

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