Two Thousand and Ten

It's a shame that we ran into double digit dates before I posted something this new year. Well, I have a post coming up this Friday, well that's if I decide it's not too personal to post. I've noticed that the last few posts have been about the inner workings of my mind and consciousness, I guess that's what it says on the tin, after all my blog tagline is 'An insight into the life of Julian E. Obubo', but my posts have become less about an account of things that go on outside me, but more of an analysis of things that are going on within. That necessarily need not be a cause for concern, but I think I can be less humorous about the thoughts, confusions and dilemmas in my head than I can be with my observations of my surroundings, and I am afraid that my next post would probably be my most personal yet, I have written it down on paper, it is quite a lengthy piece on dealing with loss and grief, and I am still not sure if I want to share the deepest parts of my psyche with the world.
Then why write it down in the first place?, you may ask...well, for me, and I guess for lots of others, writing is very cathartic, its a process whereby I can iron out the rumpled and creased barrage of emotions within me, it's a form of therapy. I can stop and pause and slowly and soberly critique my life. Of course I also have to remember that my blog is in the public sphere, and if I have chosen to share my thoughts with you all then it is my duty to entertain, whether with humour or with intelligence. It is only of late that I have begun writing deeply about myself and my beliefs, I don't want to keep a diary because I know I won't fill it out daily, but every now and then I pick up a pen and take stock of things that are going on in my life, I am a very self-aware individual, and I frequently, if not perpetually evaluate myself.
I guess the point of this particular post is just to tell my readers that my posts may become more personal in nature, but I shall try to keep them light and funny as I hope I have done successfully in the past.
My hopeful post on Friday will deal with the loss of my mother in 1995 and how I have dealt (and I'm dealing) with it, it was therapeutic to convert those emotions into words and I hope it may lead to people understanding me better.

However, it's a New Year so I'll end on a cheery note and leave you with a picture from Christmas Day with my cousins



click on photo for a larger version

Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Awkwardness of European notions of Christmas in a Nigerian Setting

I remember when I was about 14, sitting around with some American friends (in school in the Netherlands) discussing Christmas, one of them asked another at what age they stopped believing in Santa Claus. I was taken aback, was this some kind of joke, did people actually believe in Santa Claus. Did kids grow up thinking that a fat guy actually could fit into their chimney unnoticed and leave gifts? I found it unbelievable that at any age, someone would believe such a fantastical story, but I guess I had no idea about the cult of Santa Claus in the west, particularly in America.

See, I grew up in Nigeria, and Santa Claus, or Father Christmas as we call him is well known there, he adorns Christmas cards and Christmas decorations and can be seen all over TV adverts during Christmas time. But as a child I knew of no one like me who actually believed Father Christmas was real, real in the sense that it was he not your parents who delivered your gifts on Christmas day.

Although during Christmas time we were saturated with images of this foreign benevolent gift distributor we just could not identify with him on many levels. Not only is the idea of a white man dressed in winter clothes in the sweltering heat of Nigeria quite strange, but all the iconic apparatus that supported the myth of Santa Claus were very unfamiliar to us, we had no concept of what a chimney was, or mistletoe, or snow, sleighs or even reindeers. All these things were apparently common in Europe and America but they were and are alien to us, and it happened that during Christmas we threw out our cultures and traditions and adopted this strange fitting idea of a ‘White Christmas’ with mistletoe, pine trees, snow and eggnog, for a brief period in the year we were European, we were like those people on the TV with their knitted cardigans around the fireplace. The feeling I have is that we as a culture felt it was impossible to have an authentic Nigerian Christmas.

And this feeling of ‘White is Right’ was subconsciously ingrained into my little-head when I was young. My dad worked at an international agricultural agency, and so he had many colleagues from Europe and North America. At the annual Christmas party, one of his white colleagues was the Santa Claus for the day, and it felt right as a kid, for this white costumed man corresponded with the white Santa Claus from the Coca-Cola adverts and Christmas cards. I remember quite clearly as a kid feeling some sort of superiority over my friends who did not enjoy this ‘white privilege’ and thus had to endure a counterfeit ‘Black Santa Claus’, through a complex media and commercial machinery I had been indoctrinated that Santa Claus could only be white, and any other depiction was vulgar and illegitimate.

And I think to a large extent, these things are still true in Nigeria and other parts of the non-white Christian world today. It’s beautiful to see how other cultures have adapted and adjusted Christian practices to fit their respective cultures. There was once a point when exuberant singing and dancing was frowned upon in Anglican churches in West Africa, now you’d be hard pressed to walk into any Anglican church where dancing and jubilant singing is not part of the service.

This ownership of the Christian religion should also apply to Christian festivals that now have a larger secular meaning; we can create a genuinely Nigerian Christmas without having to borrow strange customs from the west. It’s about time we put our own unique stamp on Christmas.