Once upon a time, when the first week of December rolled around, bringing the refreshing “Chrismus breeze”, Jamaican householders and, in particular, those in rural communities, would be abuzz with the excitement of ‘preparations’ for the festive season.

Nowadays the buzz is still there, but it is of a different sort. Christmas celebrations in Jamaica have changed. A lot.

In the words of veteran broadcaster and media personality, Fae Ellington: “We have come a very long way.”

Christmas back then was not so much the unending parade of advertisements designed to make you spend every last penny in a frenzy of shopping, it was a time for family gatherings, eating and drinking and pure fun.

But none of this took place before the all-important top to bottom house cleaning two weeks or so into December. “It had to do with not just the house, but also the yard. There is the tradition where we used to whitewash the trunks of trees half-way up, not the entire trunk, and the stones along the pathway leading up to the house; nowadays people paint, but for rural folks it wasn’t painting, it was whitewashing,” Ellington remembers.

Women cleaned and dusted as if their lives depended on it. Out would come the china, glassware and silverware for washing and polishing, down would come the curtains and out would come the new bed spreads and table cloths.

And since all Jamaicans know that ‘food is the staff of life’, food preparations began months leading up to the end of the year. Packaged meals and frozen foods were an abomination.

“Months leading up to the end of the year you have a fowl or two that you fatten up for Christmas and those who eat pork have a pig or so that they are preparing, or a goat and so on,” Ellington chuckles in recollection. “So when Christmas day rolled around, the three-foot iron pot and the formidable ‘Dutch pot’ ruled the kitchen.”

In some communities the parade of the “Christmas cow” was much anticipated, she recalls.

“It didn’t happen a lot, but the butcher would dress up a cow with bougainvillea, crouton and shoe black flowers and parade the cow through the district and that is the cow that would be slaughtered that you would get your meat from for Christmas,” Ellington recounts.

At the end of the day, many a table would be graced by homegrown chicken, ham cured by housewives, pork, curried goat, the mighty roast beef and the traditional gungo peas and rice.

“In place of the much-acclaimed ‘Christmas cake’, there was “cornmeal pone/pudding and all kinds of preserves,” Ellington adds. And everything was washed down with servings of egg nog and sorrel. “Some children would even get a whole bottle of soda for themselves. That was a novelty back then,” she says.

“It was a family event, and parties or gatherings would be with the family or the extended family. People gave stuff to each other, but they weren’t buying gifts, and so they gave like produce from their farms and so on.

Artificial holly and mistletoe were not in the picture then either. “It was the poinsettia, and these were planted in the ground and not in pots as is now done”, says Ellington.

Children went wild with ‘fee fees’, balloons, fire crackers, chi bums, and star lights, which Ellington says were ‘a big thing then’.

Highlights of the season were the “grandmarket” outing on Christmas eve, the parade of Jonkoonu bands, the Christmas morning concert at the Ward Theatre in Kingston and ‘Chrismus morning church service’.

“Things have changed tremendously, many districts don’t have their own grandmarkets anymore. Jonkoonu was a big thing, it wasn’t just performance art the way we look at it now. The bigger towns had the Jonkoonu bands and the people used to go out and look at them and the children were scared of the characters,” Ellington reminisces.

While admitting that much has changed while the world turned, she acknowledges that it was bound to happen.

“We have come a very long way,” she says. “I’m not saying so with any great amount of remorse because things change; they don’t remain the same in life.”