Chatting with Jahim, a little Tobago resident, on Christmas Eve...
Me: You deal with Santa?
Jahim: Yes, but he don’t come by we.
Me: You wrote him a letter?
Jahim: No…But you think if I write one and put it in the mailbox he would get it when he pass by?
Me (thinking I will get him to write a letter and then buy him whatever he asks for...that is, until he tells me he will be asking Santa for a touch screen phone).
As he grooms Winston the pony, five-year old Scottish boy, Arthur, tells a friend and me that he and his family will be spending Christmas in Tobago.
The question of Santa arises. Does he really deliver gifts down the chimney?
Arthur nods and, when reminded that there are no chimneys in the tropics, he confidently says: “Santa has a special key that opens every door in the world.”
“Did you write a letter to Santa?” I ask.
He nods.
“Did you post it?”
“No, I kept it,” he says. “Santa already knows what I want.”
I am chatting with a Swedish couple, Mi and Par, who are in Tobago for the Christmas season. Mi has spent Christmas in four different parts of the world—Bali, Kenya, Mexico and, of course Sweden. Tobago will be her fifth experience. In Sweden, she tells me, the 25th and 26th are ‘red days’ (bank holidays) and from 3 pm everyone is inside with their families, watching Donald Duck cartoons (a Swedish tradition) and drinking spiced wine.
Typical foods include salted fish (often enjoyed with a shot of Snaps vodka), pickled herring, Christmas ham, beet root salad, Swedish meatballs, salmon and oven-baked anchovies and potatoes. Some people go up north to go skiing. Mi and Par tell me that here in Tobago they have been to the Botanical Gardens to see the huge decorative annual light display. “Really special and very unexpected! Amazingly beautiful,” Par says.
They tell me about the old lady who met them in the Botanical Gardens that night and, upon hearing that they were staying at a hotel in Bacolet, was concerned, warning them that Bacolet is a dark and lonely place and that (unbeknownst to Mi and Par) a German couple had recently been murdered on the beach there. Concerned about their safety as tourists alone at night, the old woman had then walked them to the taxi stand in Scarborough.
I have no idea what she looked like, but as the story is recounted, I imagine a petite, maybe even frail woman, wearing a simple dress with flowers on it, short grey-black afro, glasses shimmering with reflections of the twinkling Christmas lights. It’s heartening to think that an old woman would consider herself an able bodyguard for two strangers making their way through the dark.
On Christmas morning I stop at a corner store to buy a phone card. When I do not close the door properly, I reach back to open and close it again. The shopkeeper calls out: “Don’t worry, darling! This is Tobago! The door could stay open!” Inside, I ask for the phone card. He says I may have to wait, as the system is slow. “Two men just had to wait a long time for the card,” he says, “but you may be lucky.” Within a minute the slip of paper for my top-up slides out of the machine.
“You see?” he says. “You came in here with blessings.” Wishing blessings to all for the end of 2014 and beyond.