The festive season in South Africa is sometimes a wild thing to watch.
Apart from the ritualised “Emptying of our Inland Cities” and carefree no-look countrywide shutdown, it truly is an exercise in witnessing almost an entire nation wearily suspending their ability to take in reality as it actually is, and supplanting it with the patchwork clusterfuck that is “Northern Hemisphere Christmas Traditions”.
It’s like witnessing a slow-motion psychotic breakdown as a subtropical African country with summer temperatures that soar into the high 30s, expansive geography and a layered cultural landscape tries to do a version of a holiday that is defined by heavy roasted foods, flying reindeer with rhyming names and a nonsensical assortment of iconography invented by Victorian-era postcard manufacturers. Because if we think about it, Christmas lights only really make sense when your sleet-frozen eyes need something to pierce the grim darkness that descends at 4pm in whatever blighted country that perches on the fringe of the Arctic circle you live in. And have you ever tried to eat a bundt cake in 80% humidity?
Here’s my advice. Don’t.
Forget that tipping point as a child when you realised Father Christmas was just your dad trying to bag an extra mince-pie and a beer at 1am, the more penetrating Rubicon is when you start to wonder why South Africans, or indeed any southern hemisphere country, bothers with any of this nonsense at all? Of course, the answer is a cruel legacy of generational colonial hegemony and cultural oppression, but that isn’t very funny.
I’m not a Christmas Grinch, or even a Scrooge-lite pelting the upturned faces of passers-by with coal and venom. I really am just genuinely curious as to why we so doggedly persist with all these traditions that make zero sense for where we live. Because if one more person tries to give me some eggnog on a Durban beachfront while I’m trying to ignore the fact that I’m moving like a stilt-walker because of swamp ass, I’m going to riot.
Down for Dezemba
To make sense of it all, to try and find in myself some filament that could be twinged by the magic and delight of it all, I did the kind of heroic “on the ground” reporting that only the hardiest and determined writers can muster.
I went to the mall.
Surely there, among the harried moms carting shopping bags of what they dearly hope are the right sneaker brands for their imperious Gen Z offspring, and middle-aged men panic-buying the exact same Le Creuset giftware set as they did last year, the last pure holdout of Christmas Tradition could be found.
Except … it wasn’t?
It felt like even here the confusion of this whole thing was playing itself out in shop windows and product displays. A kid’s Christmas T-shirt featured cartoon characters wearing Father Christmas outfits … but loitering under a palm tree and lobbing presents onto a red 1970s kombi? A display for a hair-straightener claimed, in one of the most tortured word-pretzels I’ve ever seen, to be a gift “for those on the ICE list”. Even Woolies – the most doggedly effective purveyor of hams and ginned-up Christmas Cheer in the business – had a display where someone had stacked a bunch of strawberry daiquiri pre-mix next to do-it-yourself Christmas mince-pie kits. That’s going to make for a wild afternoon just about any way you slice it, and is maybe the clearest example I’ve seen of the good people in the Woolworths merchandising department throwing their hands in the air and admitting, “Yeah we really don’t know what the hell is going on any more.”
A Father Christmas sweatily stuffed into a heavy fur-trimmed suit had the kind of pained expression usually reserved for people who have just found out that the four-hour reading of Latvian slam-poetry they’ve been dragged to does not, in fact, have an interval. There were no kids lining up to get an awkward picture perched on his bony lap, and the handful of teenagers wearing lopsided elf-hats meant to whimsically evoke a mythical Scandinavian sweatshop were scrolling on their phones because there was nothing better to do. I would like to think that this was because everyone had very suddenly realised that this is a stupendously weird tradition and decided to bugger off and go get some frozen yoghurt instead.
And here’s the thing. If we’re honest, it actually is starting to feel like (whisper it) that’s what we’re doing here. Maybe South Africa is ever so slowly learning to squirm out of Santa’s iron-fisted dominion. More and more, I feel people are wishing each other a festive Dezemba more than a merry Christmas. Because let’s face it – the idea of “Dezemba”, essentially a one-size-fits-all grab-bag phrase designed to be whatever version of summer lunacy you need it to be, makes way more sense for South Africa’s supreme variety of religious and cultural backgrounds, and doesn’t involve anyone being force-fed a yule log.
I am very enthusiastic about Dezemba. It is ours. And it has friends and family and road trips and refreshing drinks and swimming pools and braais and beaches and silliness in it. And that’s the kind of festivity I’m so glad to see slowly pushing out all that red furry hat nonsense.
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