A few months ago when the avocado season was in full tilt, few would have been the homes where meals would be had without a slice or two of the widely loved pear. Now that the season has tapered off and the price of pear is on the rise, the quantity of sorrel in the markets and supermarkets is peaking and those familiar carols are on the radio, there is no doubt that the happy season of Christmas is on again.

Happy if one has family, a job and more than a few dollars to spare. A man with no job or the prospect of losing it next year is forced to bear a daily stress that is at once painful as it is personal and lonely. The female breadwinner with three children and only a figurehead of a man to “support” the children in bar talk – “A 12 me get!” – is truly a victim at this time. She is a victim in terms of her past collaboration with ignorance and the belief that if she gave her body to a man, she would be giving him her most treasured power, and he would treasure whatever the gift produced.

At this time of the year there is more than one man with $100,000 to spend on the frippery which has defined most of what Christmas has become. He will continue a tradition of forking out happily in December what he will spend all of January to March next year weeping over. He will do it because Christmas expects this of him. A poor woman, trapped in ignorance and producing five children before she reaches age 30 is as much a case of national emergency as the fact that each year we murder our own to the extent that we attract international attention for doing so.

We cannot legislate her sexual desires and behaviour, and as poor as she is and will forever be, if she attracts dozens of men who were passing by her port of call and produces 10 children by age 37, the state has no other alternative but to feed those children in primary school and offer them free tuition in high schools. The hope is that maybe one or two will actually finish high school and five of the 10 will be able to read. And of course, if the boys fall naturally down the sub-cultural hole of crime and despair, by the time they reach teenage a policeman’s bullet will keep the nation one more day away from failed-state status.

As Christmas approaches, all of us want a little more for ourselves and our families in a time when there is not enough to go around. The household with $200,000 to spend is living in a heaven that the poor young man from the family of 10 wants. And, unlike many of us who have been schooled and socialised across and upward into that middle-class heaven, that young man is prepared to enter heaven the way all people do – by dying, early too.

So he’ll be out this Christmas looking for his while you are out looking for yours. Therein lies one of the nation’s main problems.

It has been my habit for the last five years to tell people when they greet me and ask, “How are you?,” “I am OK, in one piece but if the nation is not, I am not.” However, I find that that response makes me feel old and depressingly philosophical and maybe I ought to spend more time lying and say instead, “Oh, everything is all good, all good!”

At the end of last month I turned 59 in the year the nation celebrated 47 years of independence. Which would mean that I was a young child of 12 in 1962 when we pulled down the Red, White and Blue of Britain, stopped singing, God Save our Queen, and instead hoisted the Black, Green and Gold and sang, Jamaica, Jamaica, Jamaica land we love.

I remember that year not only because of its historical context when this nation was brimming over with hope but also because it was the last time that I got something which could be called a “toy” gift at Christmas. Even now I can remember it, a red Thunderbird with a black rag top, about all of eight inches long, attached to a cable. At the end of that cable was a battery compartment (two D-size batteries), buttons for raising and lowering the convertible top and a steering wheel. Even now, I can still see a knobby-kneed, skinny little boy in short pants in the empty garage in a house off Phillip Road, paved floor polished red, burning out the batteries while powering my very own first car.

The nation has been told to brace itself for another round of taxes because, one assumes, there is no other option. In a Vox Pop in another newspaper people were asked which items they believed should be taxed. Sensibly, they suggested cosmetics and other beauty products. Realistically, they missed the point. If we are in the bind that government suggests we are in, why would it tax products that people can opt not to use?

So it seems to that the ruling administration will be hiking CGT and probably to 20 per cent. Across the board. The questions are, do we want Christmas or do we want the real news? Why can we not have both? We can’t because we spent too many years as if it was one extended Christmas.

Other pressing questions are, if I buy a Christmas ham for $6,500, should I feel guilty for doing so in a country where too many people are on minimum wage? What daily responsibility do I have as a so-called “better off” citizen in a society where I am constantly approached for handouts? Do I just budget to give away, say, $15,000 each month, part with the money in $50, $100 lots, wash my conscience clean, then go about my business? Or do I remain more indoors, spend what I earn on self and family and hope that the poor, powerless, angry and hopeless keep one more day at bay?

Even more so than last year Christmas I am very unsure what to do, quite probably because all of my adult life I have been burdened by the problems of others. How do I walk away from a woman with three raggedy kids in tow begging me $500 for food and medicine? How do I do that at Christmas? How do I listen to a grown man who started a small business, tell me that on some days his cash register rings up $500 only because of the economic downturn?

Last week Saturday at about 2 pm I went to transact business with a small entity close to the Cassia Park Road. Said the boss to me, “Up to two years ago at this time, I would have to employ three additional people to assist me with the increased business. Now it is after two o’ clock and you are my first customer.”

In reality, if we cannot take Christmas to the shopping mall, we have no other choice but to take it up in our hearts. I know that that is not enough to offer a gun-toting young man who wants his $6,500 ham too. I am not too much into “feel-good” salves as alternatives to facing up to our real problems of low economic output and borrowing this year mostly for the purpose of making us more attractive to the lending market next year. But, there is something about the weeks leading up to Christmas that is never available any other time of the year. It is love born out of human compassion. Maybe I am just as hopeless in terms of finding solutions as the religionists who believe that we can pray ourselves out of our problems. What’s your approach for this Christmas?

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