My siblings and I, ten in all, lived in Onitsha, but as children we celebrated most of our Christmases in Akokwa, a town in Nigeria’s Imo state where our parents were born.
The anticipation of wearing new clothes to church services kept all the neighborhood kids excited for each upcoming Christmas. For us, Christmas does not exist without the smell of new clothes.
We also wore new shoes, but the new shoes were never as colorful as our new clothes. Toys did not exist and never crossed our minds.
The most real tailor-made next Christmas visits and the most imminent Onitsha trip to Akokwa. November would be the signal that would prompt our mother to take us to measure ourselves.
You might think that only the rich have their clothes tailored. Not in the sixties and seventies! This period was an era of patriotism, when Nigerians were fed up with British rule and parents scoffed at anything foreign made.
We had a tailor that all children would envy. A wide smile always spread across his narrow face when he saw us. Our tailor was already an adult, but he was still in an age range where every smile does not leave a furrow on the face.
A notebook with the back cover peeled off and the inside pages crumpled, with its stump of red clay inside a pencil, always rested on the corner of a brown wooden desk. Next to him, on the desk, was his manual sewing machine.
Affectionately known as ‘uzo na akpu akwa’, the sculptor who sews clothes, he made sure our shirts and pants fit comfortably.
In her store, my brothers and I marveled at the different varieties of fabrics, stacked on wooden racks along the wall, from which we could choose.
Fabrics decorated with rose, iris, tulip and hibiscus petals, or animal shapes such as giraffes, lambs or zebras, dazzled our faces and our minds. Most of the time, after hours of partying, we ended up wearing elephant, zebra, or pink uniforms.
Everyone has a turn with the tailor. From the point of the shoulder, the tailor would run a tape measure down to the wrist. He would then stretch the tape across his back to measure the distance between the points of his shoulders. Next, he measured the circumference of the chest, the circumference of the abdomen, and the circumference around the wrists.
Sometimes, after each measurement, the tailor wrote down the numbers in the notebook. At other times he chose not to write the numbers for him. That capriciousness in an adult worried me then, but not anymore; Now I realize how capricious we are as adults.
On Christmas day, the children rushed their baths to get dressed in their new clothes. The adults started preparing the food early so that the children would have something to eat when they returned from the church service.
Those siblings old enough to dress themselves would. Others, like me, still under the age of five and still unable to dress independently, would stand in line and wait for Mother’s help.
Mom would roll up one sleeve of her shirt and I would put on my left hand and arm. He then pulled the shirt up my back, allowing me to insert my right hand and straighten my shoulders. She gathered the front hem of the shirt and began to put the flat white buttons through the holes.
Sometimes if the holes were a little small, I had to pull and move the fabric until the buttons slid to the other side of the shirt.
The older sister, Liveth, could play the role of mother and help dress her younger siblings, but I wouldn’t let her. Unlike mom, she wouldn’t have appreciated how much better she had gotten at learning how to dress me.
Only mothers can notice such nuances in the life of a child from year to year. Also, if my older sister had seen the development of my independent skills and praised me for them, the quality of her praise would not be the same as my mother’s.
All dressed in our new clothes, we headed in groups to St. Barnabas Church, the village church in Akokwa, a twenty-minute walk away. There we admire other children with similar fantasy fabrics and compare their clothes with ours.
Since the church services lasted too long and the mass was celebrated in Latin, and since God did not hear our prayers for a quicker farewell, we played on the field of the adjacent church while we waited for the real faithful to come out.
When the service ended, parents drove their Peugeots down a bumpy road outside the church building while we children hurried home on foot.
At home, we swapped our sparkly Christmas clothes with worn shirts and shorts and waited for the ‘food is ready’ signal from the kitchen.
In the kitchen, several shallow metal dishes filled with jollof rice and garnished with a piece or two of goat meat sat on the wobbly kitchen table in one corner. Planted on the side of the heap of rice would be a metal spoon with which to attack the food.
People visited her a lot on Christmas day, right up until it started to get dark. Neighbors would intervene and friends would arrive unannounced from far away. Mama also served them jollof rice enriched with a piece or two of chopped dried goat meat.
Only the night had the authority to send us to bed. We woke up wishing that Christmas hadn’t come and gone.
Before finishing this article, my fifteen year old son wanted to know about the most exciting moments of my life. From afar, it was that Christmas in Akokwa. Decades of life experiences since then can’t match that brilliant nostalgia. Not even the terrible years when Nigerian soldiers invaded the Igbo of Biafra (1967 to 1969) could diminish such wonderful childhood memories.