SMALL KINDNESSES

And subjecting my five fully grown children to the agonizing ritual of a Christmas photograph

Christmas in the Bahamas doesn’t follow the rulebook, it doesn’t look like the postcards. There’s no frost on the windows, no woolly jumpers, no pine-scented forests. It has its own kind of magic and a season we’ve shaped around sun and sea.

It’s our tradition to stay put and to gather the friends who’ve become family. Some have been celebrating with us for over twenty-five years. My parents had been friends with some of their parents, even with some of their grandparents. And our Christmas table is a joyful mix where faiths mingle, traditions collide, stories are swapped.

Even in the Caribbean heat, we honor the traditions of colder climates. The stockings, embroidered with each child’s name by my mother’s dressmaker in England are hung on the chimney piece and still I subject my five fully grown children to the agonizing ritual of a Christmas photograph.

This year was slightly different. Wesley was working late on Christmas Eve so we were reunited as a family on Christmas Day eve, which explains Wesley’s stuffed stocking on the mantel piece waiting to be opened still.

Lunch is always the day’s great centerpiece: a gloriously traditional English feast for about thirty people. The turkey is monumental, the stuffing generous, the potatoes crisp. There are sausages wrapped in bacon, bread sauce, brandy butter, mince pies, the full choir of festive flavors. And a Christmas pudding that we triumphantly set alight with David’s rum.

Whilst Claire, our long-suffering Top Banana, holds court in the kitchen, I lay the table.

Through my work with The King’s Trust this past year, I met Katie Noakes, an accomplished calligrapher and former beneficiary of the Trust’s Enterprise Program, who went on to found a flourishing studio. I asked her to write each guest’s name on this year’s Christmas crackers, which she did live during my London pop-up with all the chaos of shoppers shopping around us…it was Christmas-crackers in every sense!

Back in the Bahamas at the end of lunch, just before the pulling of the crackers David stood up and read this small bit of writing by Danusha Laméris, called SMALL KINDNESSES…

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead - you first,” “I like your hat.”

There was a short silence after David finished reading as the words sank in. Small kindnesses really are the thin threads holding the world steady and worth gripping tightly in unbalanced times.

Happy Christmas everyone, and THANK YOU for being here with me on Substack, means a great deal.