The Christmas Scene

 Mothers rush in and out of kitchens
 Each making her best to present the best meals.
 Fathers rush in and out with chickens
 Each making sure the chicken’s neck is ringed.
  
 Children keep themselves busy with Christmas trees.
 Lights blink on the trees; it comes on and off.
 Sweets and balloons hang like oranges on the tree.
 The shop-keeper’s safe is full of red coins
 Gotten from sweets and balloons.
  
 Business people swell the prices of goods,
 It is Christmas, it’s time to make profit, they say.
 Transporters double the transport fares,
 Yet, desperate passengers fight to pay,
 It is time to be with family, they say.
  
 Quarrels break out in some homes.
 Two or more girls scramble for a dress.
 “Mother loves you more than me”
 One says to the other.
  
 Christmas Eve is filled with excitement,
 Churches are filled with music,
  Memory verses are recited by the smarter kids.
 The choir sings of a frosty night,
 Marching through the snow,
 Even though it is dusty here in our land.
  
 The streets are filled with youths 
 Walking hand in glove under the moon light.
 It is a night of love, it is a night of joy.
 Fireworks hit the sky in competition with the moon and the stars.
 Off licenses are filled with men and women drinking and chanting songs of joy.
 Christ is born in Bethlehem.
  
 On Christmas day, the service is long,
 Reconciliation sounds from the pulpit.
 At home, tables are filled with assorted dishes,
 Rice overrides every dish, it  is a children’s feast.
 Keep the rice away and Christmas is marred.

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Cameroonian born Sinyuy Geraldine earned her PhD in Commonwealth Literature from the University of Yaoundé in 2018. Dr Sinyuy started writing poems in her teens and most of her poems and folktales were read and discussed on the North West Provincial Station of the Cameroon Radio Television (CRTV) Bamenda where she was often a guest writer for the programme, Literary Workshop: A Programme for Creative Writing and Literary Criticism. Sinyuy Geraldine has received the following awards: Featured Storyteller on World Pulse Story Awards, May 2017; Prize of Excellence as Best Teacher of the Year in CETIC Bangoulap, Bangangte, 23 October, 2010; Winner of the British Council Essay Writing Competition, Yaoundé, 2007; Winner of Short Story Runner-Up Prize, Literary Workshop: CRTV Bamenda, 1998. Her publications include: “Stripped” FemAsia: Asian Women’s Journal; “Invisible Barriers: Food Taboos in V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon.” Tabous: Représentations, Functions et Impacts; “Migration related malnutrition among war-instigated refugee children in the northern part of Cameroon” in South African Journal of Clinical Nutrition; “Cultural Translocation in Three  Novels of V. S. Naipaul” in International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities. Vol. IV, Issue XII; “Journey without End: A Closer Look at V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction” in International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities. Vol. IV, Issue IV; “Which Other Way? Migration and Ways of Seeing in V. S. Naipaul” in Migration, Culture and Transnational Identities: Critical Essays. Some of her   poems are featured on Time of the Poet Republic; Africa Writers Caravan; For Creative Girls Magazine; and Fired Up Magazine. She is currently working on her collection of folktales and her first novel.