The December I Used to Know

It’s December again. I hate December. The twinkling and the flashing Christmas lights. They make you dizzy when you stare too long or try to follow the lighting pattern. And the caroling. Don’t get me started on those people. Half of them are just doing it as a December gig. You feel obligated to fork over cash just to shut them up. I don’t feel it anymore—the December spirit. That’s all.

It makes me feel lonely. Don’t get me wrong—I used to love December. I remember the whole month feeling exciting when I was young: New Year, Christmas, and all that. Though, it wasn’t so much about Christmas itself. We didn’t even have a Christmas tree or any of that stuff. And it wasn’t about the gifts either. My family didn’t do gifts.

We were dirt poor when I was young—actually, right up until I finished school. Most days, I could barely make it to school without worrying whether we’d have enough money for the boat fare. That was until I got a part-time job. It helped a lot—it really did.

But December was always a happy month. I was excited—maybe it was the thought of having meat. We hardly ever ate meat when I was young, back on the island. Now, I eat meat all the time. My doctor told me I needed to eat more vegetables, but I told him, “I’ve got 20 years’ worth of vegetables stored up in my body. I’m good for a lifetime!”

But if you must know, I loathe December because I miss the time I spent with my poor family. I don’t know—when you’re poor, you really look forward to the times when you can eat a lot. With my parents gone, I have nothing to go back to on the island. My sisters are all married, too. It’s not the same feeling anymore.

Five years ago, I went back to the island, and it felt empty. My sisters, Elene and Paulina, are focused on their kids—mostly scolding them. No, I don’t want to go back to the days when I was the one being scolded. And it’s weird... they have their own families now, their own husbands.

Anyway, when I went back to the island, I felt alone. I guess it was the overall feeling. The people I used to know there are all gone. I had three grandfathers back on the island. One was by blood; the other two were just old neighbors I called grandfathers. And within one year, all of them passed away. What a tragedy. At one point, I think they were even joking about who would die first. When my neighbor-grandfather passed away first, the other two must have been so scared they followed within months! So now, I dread going back to the island. There’s nothing left for me there. Only memories. And I’m afraid they’re fading.

You may ask, how about friends? Nah, I don’t have any friends there. Not a single one. We lived in a very secluded part of the island. The neighbors were practically on the other side of the mountain. It was like a competition—who could live the farthest.

When I was young, December was the month when our father paid us for the farm work we’d done all year. Most of the time, he’d pay us on the eve of New Year’s Eve, which only made the excitement even greater. My father was a farmer, a carpenter, and a “trying hard” fisherman. So, whenever he went to the city for masonry work, all the farm work fell on us—my mother, my two sisters, and me. We did everything, from planting to weeding to harvesting. He would only pay us for weeding, though. One furrow was worth 1 cent in euros. That’s low, but it was a long time ago, you know. One furrow was about 30 meters long and half a meter wide. I could only finish five furrows a day, even with my mother’s help. I always chose the furrow next to hers because she’d weed half of mine, too. Easy money back in the day. But even with her help, I could only finish five. My sisters? They could finish seven or eight. They were relentless. We worked all summer and on weekends during the school year.

So, you see, there was no time to make friends in the neighborhood. Sometimes, I got so tired working on the farm that I wished there was no summer or weekends. I’d pick school over farm work any day. Sometimes, I’d dream of being grown up so I could move to the city and work there. My hands were full of yellow calluses. I thought working in the city would make my skin fair since the water there was full of chlorine. And I had always wanted to have fair skin.

The only time we weren’t working on the farm was when we were harvesting coconuts. My sisters and I had to gather all the coconut leaves, pile them up, and arrange them in this flat field near our house. That field was dedicated to coconut harvesting. What were the coconut leaves for? They were used as bedding for drying the coconuts in the sun. Coconut harvesting is a long process—I won’t bore you with the details. But between that and the farm work, we earned our pay. So even though we didn’t get gifts at Christmas or New Year’s, we got money. Hard-earned money.

On New Year's Day, we’d go to the sea and bring along whatever food was left from the night before—if there was any left. I remember one New Year's Eve, my father only bought three kilos of pork for New Year's. The next day, we were back to vegetables. And that year, I kid you not, we struggled more than we ever had. My father said it was because we didn’t have enough food for New Year’s Eve—we were cursed! So the next year, he made sure we had plenty of meat. Pork, mostly. But no chicken. You can’t have chicken on New Year’s—it’s bad luck. If you eat chicken on New Year’s, it means you’ll live like a chicken the whole year, scratching for food, living hand to mouth. So, no chicken on New Year’s.

That’s what I miss about December—the promise of pure festivity, a once-a-year experience. It’s different now. You can be festive anytime nowadays.