The late talk show host, Wilmot “Motty” Perkins was a big fan of inequality. According to his logic, poor people needed to see opulence, like fancy cars and big houses, around them so they could have something to dream about, wish for, and, hopefully, work towards becoming.

In that simplistic logic, if no one was rich, no one would develop the need to be rich. No one would develop a product or service that would be in demand by many and form a company to reap the rich rewards for the effort.

Christmas in Jamaica is, like in many Christianised countries, a highly commercialised affair where many enterprises — from the young woman in her backyard ‘doing hair’ to the big chain of supermarkets — make more money in one week than in the previous three months.

From ritzy uptown parties with Remy Martin, lamb chops and bottles of wine on tap to rural affairs with curried goat and rum on the ‘corners’ seeing it all passing him by, Jamaica is a land of many parts, much of it socially and economically distant from each other.

Christmas is the time when one house on the hill will be lit as if it has a Jamaica Public Service sub-station next to it, while a poor woman with her baby young child in tow, who lives five minutes away, will tell you that she hasn’t had a taste of ham in 10 years.

So we all do what we can with what we have, and the complaints among those who are economically challenged are mostly muted because the poor have become accustomed to their condition. Some have done work and have either not been paid, have been shortpaid, or given a ‘mouth cut’ to hold them until next week.

One medium-sized company that I know of, which in better years would pay all 20 or so staff members all at once, had its CEO admit to me recently that he paid some of his workers last Friday and was lucky to pay the others on Tuesday morning.

Other companies which appear large and solid to outsiders find that they have to be stalling whenever they receive invoices. Sure they will pay, they tell their business partners, but the problem is, when. It has become a part of the business landscape among a troubling percentage of businesses in Jamaica.

All that said, 40-year-old Evelyn, mother of three children and, surprisingly, with a working man at home, said to me on Tuesday: “Wi nuh have much, and nutten like ham, but it nah stop wi from enjoy wi Christmas.”

Last week I was at Daryl Vaz’s birthday party, and as I approached him in conversation with the People’s National Party’s Colin Campbell, I heard Vaz saying: “…You are doing a great job there. When we were in power it was a cesspool of corruption. You know me, I am an action man, and if it’s good I support it.”

I said: “Daryl, may I quote you on this?” And he gave me the go-ahead.

Many of us seem to believe that politicians from opposite sides of the fence are always at each other’s throats, and yet there I was hearing a JLP MP congratulating a PNP head of the Jamaica Urban Transit Company for his improvements in restructuring that troubled place. That made my Christmas.

I was at another fancy party recently where Chupski was stuffing raw fish into my mouth and I was saying: “Not bad. What is it?”

“Smoked marlin,” she said. They had wine by the cases and premium whisky flowed like a stock of Irish jokes.

The next day I was at a rural gathering where a man I saw only once came up to me and said, “Journalist, tell mi weh yuh want an’ mi get it fi yuh.”

I felt a bit embarrassed and he said, “Ah Christmas, and wi nuh have nuff, but wi will gi yuh di best ah wha wi have.” I settled for a cold Red Stripe.

Although Christmas brings into visibility the great inequality between those who have a lot and those who have little, the irony is, few among the classes seem to care much beyond the better off keeping a few treats and the poorer ones enjoying them. Christmas is just not that time to remind a society of its warts and boils.

Twenty-five-year-old Chuck gave me a seven pound piece of yam which he proudly announced as “Fi mi production. Mi grow it inna my likkle field”. I was humbled by the gift while feeling like a million dollars from being surrounded by good-hearted people like Chuck. He then reminded me of something I had done for him a few years ago, something which I had forgotten about.

“Nuh worry bout dat man. A gwine cook dis up wid some corn pork,” I said to him. I poured him a drink of white rum, he swallowed it in one gulp then said, “Mi have bout 40lb a yam lef and mi a go dung a Red Hills Road go sell it. Ah my Christmas money dat!”

Many of us wish that we had more in the pot to satisfy our needs, but somehow the spirit of togetherness nullifies the great disparity in income and spending during the season. This time around I have found reason, social and economic ones, not to have a Christmas tree.

What’s the sense of it when everyone is grown up, my children are grown adults and they are now doing what I did many years ago?

My father is 94 years old, and had he been in the best of health he would have put up his own Christmas tree. Back then, in the 1950s when I was a child, the class divisions were simple. White people had it, black people didn’t.

Things are much more complex now. Much money is locked up among a few, but it has not slowed down the entrepreneurial activity of our poorest people, especially among women. At Christmastime they come alive and as the saying goes, “Wi nah watch nuh face,” meaning that they have to do what they can and what they believe they must.

From me, I wish you happiness and better days, even as I know you wish you had more in your pocket. Make the best of the togetherness in Christmas.

observemark@gmail.com

CAP:

Whether with a Christmas tree or without, the holidays are about togetherness.

PULL QUOTE

Many of us wish that we had more in the pot to satisfy our needs, but somehow the spirit of togetherness nullifies the great disparity in income and spending during the season.