Remembrance of Christmas Past...

I began kindergarten in 1952, when the Korean War was still raging. My father and uncles being veterans of World War II, and living in former military dependants housing in a Navy town, awareness of war was as much a part of my life as my annoying little brother.



Christmas, of course, was a big deal. We Baby Boomers flooded the country, our births a joyful counterpoint to the years of war and killing, a celebration of new life and a return to normality. Gender roles were rigid and fixed and while our mothers may have chafed under the social pressure to be housewives instead of career women, we malleable little girls craved what the society…and television commercials…told us we wanted: Tiny Tears baby dolls that cried real tears, doll buggies, miniature kitchens and child-sized brooms and mops, little ironing boards with irons that actually got hot, and a host of other toys that were really nothing more than scaled-down training tools for the lives we were expected to lead.

We knew that Christmas was a time of giving and, being children, we were most concerned about who was giving what to us. But the tradition of helping the less fortunate…and the ever-present spectre of war…gave a different colour to giving. We dropped coins in the bell ringer’s kettle and thanked God every night in our bedtime prayers for our own prosperity but the reality of need did not directly touch us. Christmas to us was a glittery tree with brightly wrapped presents containing dolls, toys, games, and homemade sweets from Grandma. A packet of socks or underwear was unwelcome and even considered quite contrary to the entire concept of a joyful Christmas.

The awakening came, as many do, in school. One morning, well before the Christmas season was upon us, the teacher came to the head of the class with a stack of thin cardboards. She distributed them to us kids, one per child, and then demonstrated how to fold the scored cardboard into a box. The resultant boxes were the exact size and shape as a cigarette carton, and plain gray on the inside. The outside, however, was bright white with a vivid red cross and the words “American Red Cross” emblazoned across the top.

We were to fill these, we were told, with gifts for soldiers overseas, soldiers serving in Korea where it was bitterly cold in the winter. We didn’t understand…what could a bunch of first graders buy to make a soldier happy? Should we give them some of our Lincoln Logs or a colouring book? I was reluctant to part with my precious crayons, but if it would make some miserable soldier happy, I could be persuaded to do so. But then Mrs. Brown passed out a mimeographed sheet, still redolent of the solvents used to reproduce its purple print, a list of suggestions on it. Woolen socks. Bars of soap. Chocolate bars. Cigarettes. Dried fruit. Woolen scarfs. Medical creams and ointments. Vitamin tablets. The list went on and on and on, and I was disappointed that not one entertaining item was there for the soldiers…only what we kids considered to be “bad” presents.

We took the assembled boxed home with Mrs. Brown’s list and dutifully gave them to our parents. My mother, being the “me first!” type that she was, promptly discarded the box and list in the trash. My father, however, retrieved it and, after a disagreement with Mommy, went out for a while. When he returned, he gave me the box and inside was a brand new pair of woollen socks. He was a war veteran…he understood.

Over the next few days, more items found their way into the box…a large bar of soap, some pencils, books of matches, a couple of wash cloths…and then one evening Daddy suggested that maybe the soldier who got this box would like to have a Christmas card as well. It was months yet until Christmas, but I liked the idea. So, with my crayons and some blank newsprint, I set about to draw this soldier a Christmas tree. I also decorated the inside lid of the box.

When we brought our boxes back to school I discovered several other children had also made Christmas cards and Mrs. Brown liked the idea so much, she gave us all time and materials to make even better cards with construction paper cut-outs, glitter, sequins, and, of course library paste. I made a second, fancier card to accompany the first, and soon I had a fine package for my soldier, filling me with pride.

Before long, a woman from the Red Cross came to our classroom and made a considerable fuss over our efforts. Every classroom in our overcrowded elementary school had taken on the same project, and she now had hundreds of wonderful Christmas presents to send to the soldiers in Korea, presents that would remind them of home. She thanked us all, gathered up our boxes and took them away, leaving us feeling proud of ourselves and our efforts, but puzzled why a soldier so far away would want wool socks instead of something fun, like a game. It was not until years later that I finally figured out our packages were destined for soldiers who had no access to such luxuries as soap and warm socks: American prisoners of war in North Korea.

It never happened again. By the next school year, the “Korean Conflict” was over and our awareness of war became limited to the war movies our fathers could not pass up, our classroom “duck and cover” drills, and the Friday noon air raid sirens. With more than a dozen military bases within spitting distance of our school…including a naval air base from which the new supersonic fighters were flying…we were certain we would be a prime target for those “godless Communists” and their atomic bombs. And so we forgot about Korea and the soldiers, and the Christmas boxes faded from our memories as well.

But from this experience I began to learn the joy of giving. It was exciting to see the box slowly fill up and even through my parents were providing the goods, it was my project and I took personal pride as each new item as joined the others. Decorating the box and making the cards for the enjoyment of another…knowing I would never receive thanks or even an acknowledgment, was a new kind of pleasure. I can remember the red construction paper card with the lopsided green tree that I had laboriously cut, with dull, blunted scissors, from another sheet of construction paper, its ragged edges painstaking decorated with glitter-encrusted library paste, sequins, shreds of tissue paper, and scraps of rickrack and other bits and pieces gathered from our mothers’ sewing baskets. I thought it was the most beautiful card in the world and it made me warm inside to think of the pleasure that soldier would find in receiving it.

We cannot ever know how our circumstances can influence others…even strangers on the other side of the globe. Sometimes I find myself wondering who got my Red Cross Christmas box…and if it gave him anywhere near the pleasure to receive it as it gave me to put it together for him. The misery of that anonymous soldier, cold and wretched in an enemy prison camp, was the catalyst for a child, thousands of miles away, to first learn the rewards of giving and sharing.

It has been many, many years since that Christmas box project was undertaken by a classroom of young children, but the effects, for me, have lasted a lifetime.

Durban, Diwali, and South African spring weather

5 November 2007

One of the reasons we chose to holiday in Durban this year is that our wedding anniversary and Diwali fell at the same time. Since we always make a getaway out of our anniversary, we thought this would be a good way to celebrate both at the same time.

We spent most of Sunday with Hubby’s family. Sadly, the bulk of the Diwali public celebration took place Saturday night, while we were hurtling down the Escarpment in driving rain and blinding fog, and our sojourn to the beachfront found us wandering through a tent city of half-empty booths, the tens of thousands of revellers of the night before doubtless still sleeping off the painful, lingering results of their earlier revels. After a delicious dinner of lamb chop curry, courtesy my dear mother-in-law, we set off back to the air conditioned comfort of our B&B to sleep away the lingering fatigue from our journey.

This morning dawned overcast and humid.typical for Durban at this time of the year. We had breakfast on the verandah, Hubby seated to have a view of the sea, my vista the dense, jungly foliage of the garden. Our morning consisted of a few minor errands then lunch at Govender’s House of Curries, a takeaway place notable for having won a competition for the best bunny chow in Durban. Hubby ordered a mutton bunny and I asked for a boneless chicken roti roll. (For the uninitiated, a "bunny" is a part of a loaf of unsliced bread, the center white scooped out and then filled with curry. The center piece of bread is then placed on top. A bunny in finger food. A roti roll is like a burrito, a filling of curry wrapped up in a roti, which is similar to a tortilla.) Now, I am not a person who quails at the prospect of hot chilli crossing my tongue. In fact, I regularly enjoy hotter curries than my husband; he grew up eating curry, but I grew up eating Mexican food, which is noted for its heat. What I don’t like is when the heat overwhelms the flavour…when that happens, why not just eat a bucket of chillies and be done with it?

Hubby concurs that his bunny was the best one he had ever eaten. I wish I could say the same for my roti roll. First of all, we paid extra for boneless and I picked at least half a dozen chicken vertebra out of the meat. Second, the chicken was so hot that it had no flavour. It wasn’t hot enough to make my nose run or make me break a sweat, but there was no taste other than the chilli powder. A gross waste of money.

After a bit of shopping in the antique shops of Windermere Road, we went back to the room where, still stuffed with his mutton curry, Hubby took his customary afternoon nap. When it was time for dinner we headed out for Florida Road, determined to drop in on one of the trendy eateries. Hubby was hungry for steak so we selected the Butcher Boys and, as luck would have it, were able to get a table after only about half an hour’s wait.

None of the starters appealed to me and, knowing the upcoming meal would be heavy with meat and potato, I ordered a salad for my starter…a Greek salad, to be exact, one that, according to the menu, consisted of greens, onion, tomato, cucumber, black olives, and dressing. ‘Yum!’ I thought to myself. ‘Black olives, not kalamatas!” I tend to shy away from green salads I have not already seen served up due to an unfortunate propensity of many restaurants for chopping up green peppers into little invisible chunks and scattering them generously over the salad as if they were rose petals for a bride to tread upon. But green peppers were not on the list of ingredients, so I ordered with confidence.

I do not understand why people who prepare food for others so often do not recognize that the quantity of a particularly strongly-flavoured ingredient must be balanced against the quantity of milder ingredients. If you were to make a single-serving salad that included a full teaspoon of chopped garlic, the other ingredients would be rather superfluous, wouldn’t they? After all, what would you be able to taste, other than the garlic? Well, for me, green peppers are like that. I can be happily munching along on a wad of sumptuously dressed lettuce and the moment my teeth crush that little fragment of green pepper, that’s all I can taste.

So, my Greek salad came and the olives were kalamata, which instantly found their way to Hubby’s plate, and the top of the salad was strewn with long strips of red and yellow peppers, kissing cousins to the offensive green. Fortunately they were brightly coloured and did not blend in with the lettuce, so I was able to spot them and get them out of the salad before they contaminated the remaining ingredients with their pungent oils. But pepper strips on a Greek salad?? Since when?

I wasn’t so lucky with dinner. If you were to ask me to list my least favourite vegetables in the world, at the top of the list would be boiled, steamed or creamed spinach and any kind of yellow squash prepared in any manner except as a pumpkin custard pie. I loathe and detest creamed vegetables of any kind, preferring my veg steamed until barely done, then served plain or with just a hint of sweet butter. And the smell of cooked yellow squash makes my stomach…well, let’s just say that the smell has so much power to turn my tummy inside out, I couldn’t even stand the smell of it in the little jars of baby food…none of my kids ever had that nasty yellow stuff shoved in their unwilling little rosebud mouths!

Unfortunately, creamed spinach and puréed butternut squash seem to be the national veg dishes of South Africa, so when we go out to eat, I never leave the veg to chance…whenever possible I order an alternative, even if it is just a salad. So I was pleased to note on the menu that roasted fresh vegetables were available and placed an order, figuring that if roasted chunks of butternut showed up in the mix, I’d just shove them to the side…it’s nigh unto impossible to roast creamed spinach!

And so dinner finally arrived. I found myself again a bit disappointed: I should have ordered the baked potato, as the chips were not fresh (made from frozen potatoes and mealy-grainy textured inside), and my ribs, while tasty, had to be cut apart with a knife and then gnawed roughly off the bone…none of that delicious, decadent, falling-off-the-bone tenderness that I associate with really good ribs. But the jewel in the crown of disappointment was the roasted veg I ordered: carrots, broccoli, slices of courgettes, and pieces of onion shared a bowl with huge chunks of roasted red and yellow pepper! Hubby quickly scooped the offending peppers out of the bowl and onto his plate, but the damage was done. Everything in the bowl tasted like peppers, even the broccoli, a strongly-flavoured vegetable in its own right.

The baked blueberry cheesecake was tasty, although the portions were no more than half the size as those served by Dulcé in Cape Town. But it did make a lovely end to the meal and our stroll back to Bertha is the balmy night air was pleasant.

So now we are back at the B&B, comfortably ensconced in the bed, Hubby reading while I sit here clickety clicking away on the keyboard. Tomorrow, if the sun comes out (we are having extended periods of overcast here), we’ll take the camera and go to the Botanical Gardens, a place I’ve wanted to visit since before my first trip to SA. If it stays overcast, we’ll head for the Victoria Street market for some spice shopping. Mum tells me that Jayshrees is having a sale, and I’d love to make a run at the shoe shops in The Pavilion. We’ll just have to see what tomorrow’s weather brings…

Holiday in Durban...

Saturday, 3 November 2007

We are taking a holiday to Durban…and we are taking Bertha (our Mercedes ML430). Our anniversary and Diwali fall at the same time this year and it was our intent to combine the celebrations. And my dear Hubby’s gift to me was a week of shopping. He’s such a darling!

We managed to get out of town just a few minutes past 3, but seeing as how it was a Friday afternoon, the roads were already busy. Once out of town, however, the traffic thinned and we were left with a gloriously clear afternoon and room for Bertha to stretch herself. We leaned back and hit the road.

Hubby and his little sports car collect a lot of traffic fines. Late last month we received four of them in the mail, two issued on the same day from the same spot, only 20 minutes apart! Duly chastened and R2000 poorer, Hubby undertook to be more circumspect on our road trip and set Betha’s cruise control according to the posted limits. It turns out to have been a good thing: while the municipalities may rely on cameras to catch their speed demons, out in the bundu it’s traffic cops sitting on the side of the road just over the top of a hill or around the side of a blind curve. I saw more traffic cops yesterday afternoon than I see in an entire month in town! (Note to American readers: traffic enforcement is a separate division from law enforcement here and, unlike in America, law enforcement officers will not accost you for making an illegal U-turn or busting a red light. That’s the job of the traffic police.)

I have a theory about this... There are basically two tiers of cities in South Africa: the big ones like Joburg and Cape Town, and the medium ones like Bloemfontein and Pietermaritzburg. Every thing else is smallish by comparison, and some of the towns here are minute little specks of human habitation plunked down in the middle of nowhere…like Leeu Gamka. The biggest problem with these little places, I think, is that they lack any real source of revenue and they are too small and/or uninteresting to draw that stream of tourist bucks which keep other places alive. They languish as poverty pockets, unable to even properly maintain their municipal responsibilities. Then somebody introduced their local gendarmes to the traffic camera and not long after that somebody realized that you could use it to pick the tourist’s pockets without ever having to look in their tired eyes and try to puzzle out their accents.

Laingsburg is a case in point. Famous for no more than having been nearly drowned out by the Buffel River some 25 years ago, Laingsburg has joined the growing cartel of nowhere towns that have lost sight of the real reason for speed zones: reducing traffic speed for safety purposes, which can usually be accomplished by the simple expedient of parking a traffic cop car visibly by the side of the highway. Little more than a wide spot in the road, population less than 6,000, Laingsburg’s entire physical presence is little bigger than a couple of sizeable petrol stations and the obligatory bottle store…but it boasts a huge board at its outskirts bragging of how many thousands of speeders have been cited there in recent months. This may seem laudable at first glance, but when you stop to realize that the place is just one giant speed trap, it becomes obvious that this is likely the town’s main source of income. Why else would you be required to slow to 60kph (from the 120 of the highway) in order to pass a petrol station out in the middle of the desert? No agriculture? No industry? Need money? Put up a speed trap and rake in the bucks!

So, we managed to get through Laingsburg and a few other speed traps (one of them with a mobile courtroom right there to pick your pocket on the spot!) and after a Steer burger in one of the Engen stops (franchised eateries are the way to go when you are on the road…no menu mysteries and uniform standards of hygiene in the kitchens), we finally made it to Beaufort West…another town with a well-established speed fine industry, our destination for the night.

Hubby booked us into the Lemoenfontein (which means “orange fountain” or “orange spring” for you English speakers) Game Lodge just outside Beaufort West. We drove through town…very circumspectly, having left a wad of money at the police station there a couple of years back…just before 9 pm, and at the other side of town found our turn. The sign said it was the road to De Jager Pass but our instructions said to go only 1.6 km and then turn left again. Of course, it was darker than Satan’s heart out and the road turned out to be a dirt track replete with signs indicating water-filled ditches that we would have to drive across. But, I reasoned, it was only 1.6 kms and Bertha is an SUV, after all, so not to worry. High beams on, we rolled over the pebble-strewn surface until we found the sign to Lemoenfontein and duly turned left.

Well, if I had thought the De Jager pass road was a rough patch, it turned out to be a superhighway compared to the rutted track ahead of us. In the kind of pitch darkness that you can only experience out in the wilderness, we bumped and bounced our way for five kilometres up this swath that looked to be little more than a bulldozer’s bumpy track through the countryside. One lane wide and strewn with little boulders and big dips, it meandered through the rough terrain and up to a huge house that glowed like a jewel set on black velvet. We had finally arrived!

Tired from our journey, we didn’t waste any time on unnecessary amenities but went straight to our room. It was decorated in a “country living” kind of way, two wing chairs and a red Persian carpet set in front of the little Victorian fireplace, and the bathroom was a successful marriage of Victorian beadboard walls and footed tub with the modern double shower (two sets of temp control and two rain shower rosettes in a single large enclosure!). We were pleased to find the same brand of air conditioner that we have at home, so no time was wasted figuring out how it worked…it was 9 pm and still 27 degrees outside, and the room had a closed and stuffy feel to it. By ten we had turned off the light and within minutes Hubby was gently snoring beside me and I was drifting off to sleep. The one negative note was the carpet…sisal…a very unpleasant experience on the bottom of bare feet in the middle of the night.

It is now 7:30 am and Hubby continues to snork at my side. Breakfast is at 8:30 and we hit the road again immediately thereafter, but first I’m going to grab the camera and do a little prowling about. We are at a game reserve, after all…maybe I can catch a glimpse of something worth immortalizing!


* * *

Not a creature was stirring. It was already too late…and too hot…to catch anything foraging. On the road again…

Happy New Year

Hubby's mum, brother and nephew are here for a week so we had to plan our New Year around the presence of a precocious 12-year-old. No wild partying, no clubbing, no celebrating with reckless abandon...as if we might do that anyway...just something appropriate to share with a 12 year old.

At first we thought we'd go down to the V&A Waterfront where they set off fireworks at midnight and all the ships in port blow their horns, creating a cacophony that startles the snoozing seagulls into swooping excitedly over the celebrating crowd, occasionally dropping little wet seagull bombs on the unsuspecting below. But a couple of days ago a local nutcase and member of a local nutcase terrorist group was arrested with three pipe bombs on his person. During a vigorous interrogation it was discovered that there was a total of 11 pipe bombs, but Mr. Nutcase was not forthcoming with their location, only the information that they were intended to be planted in and around the Waterfront. This news, of course, put the kibosh on our plans to take the kid over to watch fireworks and terrified seagulls and we had to come up with something else.

It's been cold in Cape Town the last few days, with intermittent rain and cool breezes. After dark, the breezes become brisk and the air distinctly chilled. So, deprived of our Waterfront venue for celebrating the New Year, we decided to go down to the beachfront here in Table View and watch the Waterfront fireworks from across Table Bay. It was a brilliant plan, spoiled only by the fact that enough other people had the same idea that we couldn't get parking in the parking lots right on the beach, so we had to park a block away and walk in the wind-whipped cold. Bundled in winter coats and fluffy shawls, we trudged to the beachfront and took seats in the little brick amphitheatre and huddled together for warmth. Five minutes before the critical moment, Hubby cracked open the bottle of chilled champagne we had brought with us and, as the ships across the Bay began their basso profundo warblings punctuated by the sharp reports of exploding fireworks, we raised our glasses and ushered the old year out while welcoming the new year in.

And now we've returned to the warmth and comfort of home, heads a little fuzzy with fizzy , and ready to turn in.

Happy New Year to you all, may it be your best year yet!

Merry Christmas!

Here's a Christmas card for all of you! Hope your holidays are the absolute best!