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Thursday, July 24, 2025

The ghosts of Christmas past

by

20131220

Re­cent­ly I was asked by a jour­nal­ist to share my feel­ings on Christ­mas: love it or hate?My true feel­ings are more com­plex than I let on, be­cause I'm sure she had a word lim­it, as well as her own lim­it as to how much of my jaw­ing she could with­stand.Com­ing up with some suc­cinct an­swers did con­jure some ghosts of my Christ­mas past. This is per­haps be­cause those mem­o­ries will al­ways out­shine what ob­tains for mod­ern-day ob­ser­va­tion of the sea­son.

I was forced back fur­ther still, in­to the dark­est re­cess­es of my mind, when I heard a com­i­cal and some­what salty rant on Face­book about an un­pleas­ant en­counter with a pur­vey­or of pastelles now put up on a pedestal.The bit­ter vent­ing hinged on the "au­thor's" dis­gust with a shock­ing­ly poor cus­tomer ser­vice ex­pe­ri­ence and con­clud­ed with a rec­om­men­da­tion that the of­fen­sive­ly in­dif­fer­ent pastelle deal­er im­me­di­ate­ly lodge all of her pastelles in her sig­moid colon.

In my day the pastelle was a hum­ble thing; in­deed, you were more like­ly to have been gift­ed a par­cel of pastelles, rather than run­ning them down like tick­ets for a Plea­sure Queen boat cruise. This week I saw pastelles be­ing sold in a bak­ery at the LOL price of $20 per!

You'd swear that these pa­per-thin corn­meal en­velopes with two grams of fill­ing were wrapped in gold leaf and not ba­nana leaf.

I re­mem­ber a very dif­fer­ent pastelle. I dis­tinct­ly re­call wak­ing up on Christ­mas morn­ing, eat­ing one pastelle and hav­ing to im­me­di­ate­ly re­turn to bed. Those pastelles were sub­stan­tial and de­mand­ed all of the en­er­gy your body could muster to di­gest them.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers


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