O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,
O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem!
We recur the final mass hymn in our grandmother’s kitchen, straining our voices to make a choir of three. Dani hovers over the coal pot, fanning the live coal through the air vent in its side. Jacob is in the adjoining dining room, setting the table. His voice comes in through the opening in the wall through which I pass the plates, water still dripping down my arms to my elbows and the cement floor.
We are the only three grandchildren present to help Grandma prepare for Christmas lunch. She is in the hallway outside, nimble fingers rounding the beads on an old rosary, rubbing the wooden spheres from one end to the other, praying for something we do not know.
My hands are elbow-deep in soap suds and glasses. Momentarily, I wish I had changed out of the slacks I wore to mass when Dani told me to. Now I have to be careful not to let the water drip down into my pants.
The glasses are old and dusty and have turned the soapy water a greyish-brown. But when I rinse them off, they gleam without blemish. They are the newer old ones. The ones Grandma sets aside for special occasions like this, when the entire family gets together. I don’t understand it, the hoarding of plates for a special day. My mother does it too. No doubt a practice passed down from her mother and her mother's mother. New glasses, plates, and pots that never see the light of day till they are ready to be glorified.
Once, we spent Christmas with my father’s family in between raging house parties in Osu, with blaring Ga music and cousins we had not met till the day and I saw his mother do it, too. So I asked him about it.
‘Tradition,’ he called it. A passing on of practices, no matter how flawed they may seem.
‘You’ll understand it one day,’ he concluded, seeing the confusion on my face.
I shook my head. Vehement refusal. And he shrugged.
He pulled me aside days later, when the sun had yet to rise on the new year. He told me it was beyond tradition. It was culture.
When done, we leave for the balcony, the plates dripping onto the dining table, and Grandma still in the hall. Grandma’s house overlooks the seaside, so we drink in the air of sea salt and rust as we sit on the balcony watching the road, waiting for the arrival of the cousins. It’s been hours of silence. We would cross the road and venture to the shore, but she’d warned us to wait for company.
So we hover, and we wait. Dani points out the boats that sail the waves and counts. Four. Each is too far in the distance to see what images they color their sails with. They are just plain blocks of color to us.
Jacob goes inside and comes out with an oware board and a stool. Without meaning to, he pushes me out of the way and sets the board between him and Dani. I want to but in and cry out that I don’t know how to play well enough not to be a lousy opponent. But Joshua waves me off before I can speak.
I find myself at Grandma’s side. I think she’s yet to notice me, by the way her hands move undeterred. I’m so close I can hear her mumbling the words of the Hail Mary.
‘…pray for us sinners…’
This isn’t the time to be in a mood so somber, but I can't very well tell my grandmother that.
‘Bring the stool closer.’ She says between prayers, nodding her head as I lift the stool to her side instead of dragging it.
Grandma reaches over to the small table by her left-hand side and pulls out a rosary. It’s plastic, unlike hers, a green-tinted white. She hands it to me, and I go blank. She is Catholic, but my siblings and I aren’t. Our father attends the Methodist church up our street, but he claims to be Presbyterian. Mum follows along most days, tucking the rosary around her neck beneath her clothing so it doesn’t stand out.
‘Do you know how to use it?’ Grandma asks. She already knows the answer, but I indulge her.
‘No.’
She is almost done with her round over the beads, but she resets and starts from the beginning with me. I mimic her movements, smooth in contrast to my fractured ones, as she raises the cross to touch her forehead, chest, and then shoulders.
‘In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’
I think of how my mother wears the rosary around her neck without the careful intention Grandma has. How she takes it off for work events and only remembers to hang it around her neck when she thinks of Grandma. How Dani’s peeks from beneath her collar in school, and she hides it away because it’s prohibited.
We say the creed, and I wonder how the words bring us any closer to God. Daddy believes God is all around us. He will never say it to Mum’s face, but he furrows his brow when she points to the importance of the creeds. Though she herself does not say them for anything more than nostalgia.
The rosary means nothing to her, I think. Maybe it’s just the years of life beneath Grandma’s roof, or the hours they’d spent droning over the beads. Less faith and more convenience is what it becomes to Dani through Mum. Tradition. The passing on of practices, no matter how flawed they may seem.
I know the Hail Mary because it’s ever on Grandma’s lips. I join her in chanting the parts ingrained in my memory.
‘…blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus…’
Ah yes! This holiday is about him. The boy saviour.
Serenity is quickly replaced with chatter as the cousins stream in. They are too burdened with trays of food to launch themselves on me but I see the threat in their eyes as they march in an orderly line, all six of them, one after the other. Dani and Jacob are drawn by the noise, but before they can run off following our cousins as they make their way to the dining room, they are caught up by the uncles and aunts, wishing Merry Christmases and agreeing to exclamations that they indeed grew thinner in school.
Grandma pats me on the shoulder, relinquishing me from the interrupted prayer without a word. I make to hand the rosary back, but she waves me off.
‘Ei, Philip, is that you?’ My Uncle Nana exclaims. His voice pulls me away from Grandma. My spot is quickly replaced with her other kids, forty-year-old men with greying beards who wait their turns to ask how she is doing.
Uncle Nana pats me hard on the back before letting me go. From a room away, between parents and kids, I hear both sides’ voices meld into one merry chorus of chatter. The rosary beads are cool as I slip them on.
Naa Shika Coleman is an emerging Ghanaian writer whose work explores memory, grief, and identity through intimate storytelling. She leans towards emotional honesty and cares about quiet stories told in truth. Her work has appeared in the Nenta literary journal, Writer’s Space Africa magazine, and is forthcoming in the Wingless Dreamer.
(IG: @coleman_shikaaa)